Social and Ecological Impacts of the World's Biggest Fishery: Analyzing Tradeoffs in Peruvian Fisheries

The world’s biggest fishery is for anchoveta in the Peruvian upwelling ecosystem. Anchoveta fluctuates strongly in abundance, and this in turn impacts the rest of the ecosystem as well as the many Peruvians who rely on fisheries for food and employment. We have developed a management model of the Peruvian EEZ, which combines an ecological food web model with economic and social value chain analysis. An individual quota system was recently introduced for managing the anchoveta fishery, and we here use ecosystem-level Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) to compare the quota system with alternative management procedures. We quantify ecological, economic, and social tradeoffs in management with the aim of evaluating how robust the alternative management procedures are to the inherent ecological and management uncertainties.