Fishing capacity of the southeastern Black Sea anchovy fishery

Georgian, Turkish and Ukrainian vessels have exploited the southeastern Black Sea anchovy fish stock in the Economic Exclusive Zone (EEZ) of Georgia since 1999. This exploitation has resulted in a significant decrease of the anchovy fish stock. The availability of reliable and accurate measures of the capacity and overcapacity of the fleet provides policymakers with useful tools to avoid rent dissipation of fishermen and/or the overexploitation of anchovy stocks. This paper is aimed at measuring the fishing capacity and the structural excess of fishing capacity over sustainable levels (overcapacity) of this fleet in the period 2005-2009. Two data envelopment analysis linear mathematical programs were run to attain the desired measures. This paper concludes that fishing capacity was 142.37 mT in the 2008-2009 season and that it increased since the implementation of a new management framework in 2006. This paper also concludes that there was a considerable overcapacity of the fleet in 2009, given that the measured fishing capacity exceeded almost 2 times the Total Allowable Catch set by policymakers, and the technical efficiency of the fleet was very low. These results suggest the necessity of international cooperative rights-based fisheries management to guarantee bio-economic sustainability.