Economic Aspects of the Open Ocean Fishery Resources Development

The biological basis for open-ocean fisheries is large, but utilization of both traditional as well as unconventional resources requires new harvesting and processing technologies and much more efficient fishing vessels and support ships. Some nations are expanding their ocean-going fleets but the basic constraint lies in the economics of these activities, as costs of distant-water fisheries are already very high and will tend to grow quickly in the foreseeable future. It becomes increasingly evident that contemporary open-ocean fisheries are economically inefficient and as a high energy consuming activity can be developed only with governmental subsidies, which at the present time support this expansion for political rather than economic reasons.