The 1999 Pacific Salmon Agreement: A Sustainable Solution?

AuthorMiller, Kathleen A.
  1. INTRODUCTION

    When Canada and the United States signed the Pacific Salmon Agreement on June 30, 1999, they hoped that it would put an end to the pattern of bickering, failed negotiations, conservation-threatening harvest practices, and blame-laying that had prevailed over the previous six years. The agreement does not replace the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty, but rather puts additional obligations on the parties and replaces the expired short-term harvest management regimes, contained in an annex to the treaty, with new longer-term arrangements. The two nations thereby consented to temporarily set aside a long-smoldering dispute about the equitable division of the harvest and to focus instead on implementing multiyear, abundance-based harvesting regimes that would foster conservation and restoration of depressed salmon stocks. The agreement has been in place now for two full fishing seasons, and at the time of this writing the two nations are in the midst of a third year of coordinated management under the new regime.

    While the ultimate success of the new agreement is yet to be determined, sufficient time has passed to allow a preliminary assessment of its performance as well as an enumeration of the challenges that may lie ahead. Success can be gauged by the extent to which the agreement facilitates stable cooperation while promoting such diverse goals as preservation and restoration of salmon resources, efficient management of fisheries, and a mutual perception that the distribution of the benefits is equitable.

    Is the 1999 agreement designed for success? What other changes might be needed to ensure continued bi-national cooperation on Pacific salmon management? To address these questions, we begin by briefly reviewing previous analyses of the breakdown of cooperation under the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty (Huppert, 1995; McDorman, 1995; Miller, 1996; Munro et al., 1998; McDorman, 1998a). We then examine the negotiation process which led to the new agreement, evaluate the differences between the new and old approaches, and draw upon both game-theoretic analysis arid actual experience to assess the extent to which the 1999 agreement is likely to succeed.

    Our analysis suggests that real progress has been made. Specifically, the abundance-based rules appear to be much better suited to effective management of harvesting effort when there are sustained natural changes in salmon abundance. In addition, the new agreement opens the door to using enhancement projects funded through newly established endowment funds both to facilitate restoration of depleted stocks and to provide the parties with incentives to continue cooperating. Cooperation also may be supported by the growing significance of conservation concerns in Canada and U.S. Pacific northwest. These concerns have been fueled by the severely depleted state of some Canadian coho and chinook stocks, and recent listings of several salmon stocks in the U.S. Pacific northwest as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA--see National Marine Fisheries Service, 1999; U.S. Federal Register, 2000). However, sustained cooperation is not ensured. In particular, difficulties in forecasting and measuring the abund ance of the numerous salmon stocks subject to the agreement may prove to be a stumbling block. We conclude by drawing upon our analysis as well as experiences in other fisheries to suggest further options that could be pursued to maintain positive momentum toward achieving the promise of sustained, mutually beneficial cooperation.

  2. THE HARVEST MANAGEMENT GAME

    Pacific salmon are anadromous fish. The juveniles emerge from the freshwater environment where they were born, feed and mature in the ocean, and then return to their natal streams to spawn and die. Many of the salmon stocks originating in the rivers of western North America are inherently bi-national resources because they cross international boundaries during their oceanic migrations. The need for cooperative management arises because harvesters in one jurisdiction can intercept salmon heading to spawn in the rivers of the other jurisdiction. As is so often the case with such fisheries, it has been difficult for Canada and the U.S. to attain and maintain cooperation, and their efforts have been marked by alternating periods of harmony and discord.

    Cooperation can pay in an international fishery because it can dramatically expand the long-term size, value, and stability of harvest yields. This year's harvesting activities affect both net returns for this year and the size of potential harvests in future years. If cooperation leads to better conservation, a more highly valued allocation of the fish, and/or lower harvesting costs, all parties can benefit. The existence of such potential gains drives efforts to negotiate cooperative management agreements, but the way in which those gains are divided is critical in determining the willingness of the parties to participate.

    Game theory provides an analytical framework that sheds considerable light on the question of why negotiations sometimes lead to stable cooperative agreements and why they fail at other times. Game theory is designed to analyze strategic interactions among independent, sell-interested players, in which any agreement results from hard bargaining. The players are modeled as rationally choosing a strategy on the basis of expected payoffs, given the likely actions of the other players over the entire sequence of play. Interactions among the players can be modeled as occurring only once or repeated many times, and as involving different levels of information and communication among the players. A repeated game is "dynamic" if the initial conditions and expected payoffs at the start of each period of play change as a result of the players' past actions. The two main categories of games, "cooperative" and "non-cooperative", differ in that the players in a cooperative game are assumed to be able to communicate freely , while communication is faulty or nonexistent in non-cooperative games.

    When applied to international fisheries, the players in the game are the respective national authorities who either choose to set independent policies governing harvests by their respective fleets, or to negotiate coordinated fishing policies with the other national authority(ies). One can model the process of negotiating harvest allocation agreements under the Pacific Salmon Treaty as a dynamic cooperative game.

    A cooperative game is said to have a "solution" if the players' interactions result in a stable outcome. However, many games do not have such a solution, in which case cooperation would be predicted to fail. If cooperation is achieved, it is not motivated by altruism but by the possibility that all parties can gain by avoiding the destructive consequences of non-cooperation. To be stable and efficient, a cooperative solution must satisfy the following conditions: 1) the solution must be "Pareto optimal," which means that it must not be possible to make one player better off without harming the other(s), and 2) the individual rationality constraint for each player must be met, which means that it must not be possible for any player to do better by refusing to cooperate (Munro et al., 1998).

    Individual rationality is central to the success of any agreement, and it must be honored if cooperation is to be sustained. An agreement will remain viable only so long as each party perceives some benefit to continued cooperation. Incentives to cooperate, however, are not necessarily stable. If conditions controlling either the productivity of a shared resource or its value change over time, the parties' estimates of the benefits of cooperation versus going it alone may also change. Cooperation is likely to break down if changing circumstances cause one or more of the parties to believe that it can do better outside of the agreement. A sustainable agreement, therefore, not only must accommodate the initial individual rationality positions of the participants, but it must also be "time consistent" (Munro, 2000). That is to say, it must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate unexpected changes in surrounding conditions. Among other things, it must be sufficiently flexible to adjust the division of benefits a s the players' competitive power and interests shift with changing natural conditions and market circumstances. One way to provide such flexibility is to allow the parties to make "side payments"( i.e., transfers) to one another when there is no other convenient way to simultaneously satisfy individual rationality and capture the potential gains from cooperation. In some instances, it may not be possible to satisfy the players' multiple objectives by simply re-allocating the benefits of the harvest. In such cases, sustained cooperation would require supporting side payments with value injected from outside the fishery. For example, one of the two governments might transfer resources to the other through disproportionate contributions to a joint project or through concessions on a non-fishery matter.

    Unfortunately, throughout the history of U.S.--Canadian negotiations regarding Pacific salmon management, there has been scant attention to the significance of individual rationality. In addition, the bargaining framework established by the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty provided little latitude for accommodating changes in the parties' interests over time. Until recently, the question of providing side payments was never "on the bargaining table." However, as will be detailed below, shifts in the interests and competitive power of these parties have played a large role in the historical ebb and flow of bi-national cooperation in this arena.

    Before proceeding further, we should digress by asking what the consequences are of failure to cooperate. Models of "non-cooperative" fisheries games yield firm and consistent predictions (see, for example, Clark...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT