Search for: All records

Sustainable development (SD) policies targeting marine economic sectors, designed to alleviate poverty and conserve marine ecosystems, have proliferated in recent years. Many developing countries are providing poor fishing households with new fishing boats (fishing capital) that can be used further offshore as a means to improve incomes and relieve fishing pressure on nearshore fish stocks. These kinds of policies are a marine variant of traditional SD policies focused on agriculture. Here, we evaluate ex ante economic and environmental impacts of provisions of fishing and agricultural capital, with and without enforcement of fishing regulations that prohibit the use of larger vessels in nearshore habitats. Combining methods from development economics, natural resource economics, and marine ecology, we use a unique dataset and modeling framework to account for linkages between households, business sectors, markets, and local fish stocks. We show that the policies investing capital in local marine fisheries or agricultural sectors achieve income gains for targeted households, but knock-on effects lead to increased harvest of nearshore fish, making them unlikely to achieve conservation objectives in rural coastal economies. However, pairing an agriculture stimulus with increasing enforcement of existing fisheries’ regulations may lead to a win–win situation. While marine-based policies could be an important tool to achieve two of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (alleviate poverty and protect vulnerable marine resources), their success is by no means assured and requires consideration of land and marine socioeconomic linkages inherent in rural economies. 

A new generation of poverty programs around the globe provides cash payments to poor and vulnerable households. Studies show that these social cash transfer programs create income and welfare benefits for poor households and the local economies where they live. However, this may come at the cost of damaging local environments if cash payments stimulate food production that conflicts with natural resource conservation. Evaluations of the economic impacts of poverty programs do not account for the welfare consequences of environmental impacts, which are potentially large for poor communities closely tied to natural resources. We use an ex-ante policy simulation tool, a bioeconomic local computable general equilibrium model parameterized with microsurvey data, to analyze the expected welfare consequences of environmental degradation caused by a cash transfer program. For a Philippine fishing community that is a net importer of fish, we show that a government cash transfer program initially increases real incomes for all households. However, increased demand for fish leads to a decline in the local fish stock that reduces program benefits. Household groups experience declines in real income benefits of 2–63%, with fishing households suffering the largest declines. Impacts on local fish stocks depend on the extent to which markets link fishing communities to outside regions through trade. Greater market integration can mitigate the fish stock decline, but this reduces the local income benefits of cash transfers.