Fishcoin Use Case: Incentivising Mark, Release, Re-Capture & Conservation
An approach to collaborative research, improving economic yield, and conserving and growing fish stocks
“Research can be carried out collaboratively between resource users and scientists to gain a more complete understanding of the resource and, from there, to bring about rehabilitation of overexploited fisheries.” — Hoefnagel et al. (2006)
In March I was on a hand line fishing vessel off the island of Lombok, Indonesia doing some testing of the mFish electronic catch documentation (eCD) application. Whilst the application was working well on the fishing ground more than 3 kilometres offshore, the fishermen were catching a variety of species, probably over twenty in all, and unfortunately almost all were juvenile fish.
In particular one fish stood out to me, a beautiful Coral Trout (Plectropomus leopardus) but also a juvenile not much larger than my hand. I asked the fisherman how much he would get for this fish and he said about 1000 Indonesian rupiah — less than US$0.07c for a fish that if allowed to grow could fetch $35.00 to $65.00/kg on certain markets. Obviously fishermen do not get that market price but they could get a great deal more for larger fish that are demanded by the market.
This made me think how we could incentivise fishermen to keep those fish in the water. With our mFish and Fishcoin initiatives we have been focussing on the incentive to capture data from fishermen as they capture fish for the purpose of traceability and fisheries management. What if the fishermen received an incentive for tagging and releasing the fish?
Mark, release, recapture is a classic technique used to assess population size as well as to gather other useful data like growth rates. The process involves marking (tagging), recording data, releasing the animals, and then obtaining data again when they are recaptured. In a fisheries context, scientists often do the tagging and fishermen can be rewarded for retrieving a tag and providing information such as the fish length and weight. This traditional approach only works if fishermen are aware of the initiative, and even then, if the reward is perceived to be too low for their effort, or it comes too late to them, they may not bother.
So how might Fishcoin work as an incentive — especially in developing nations? Tags could be given to a fisher (numbers of tags linked to a fisherman and his boat), and he could be transferred Fishcoin tokens after tagging, recording and transferring data, and releasing the fish. In this case, he may be incentivised to do this by as little as US$0.15c worth of tokens — more than double than the fisher would have received for the juvenile coral trout. These tokens can then be exchanged for mobile air time top ups giving him and his family greater access to the transformational power of the internet, and giving governments, R&D institutes, and/or NGOs valuable information they need to manage the fishery from which he and his community derive income and protein.
The next fisherman that captures that fish could also be incentivised for recording data and releasing the fish — a few more tokens as the fish has probably grown — say US$0.20c worth of Fishcoin tokens. At the same time as the second fisherman receiving his tokens, the first fisherman could also receive more tokens thus further incentivising him to be a part of the program.
When a third fisherman captures this fish it may be ready for market (or a minimal size as part of a Fishery Improvement Project) so he lands the fish and records and transfers the information. Then at the same time as this third fisher receives his tokens the second and first fishermen also receive more tokens. Maybe a dollar or two of tokens have been transferred but maybe the value of the fish has increased 100 fold from US$0.08c to $8.00. The first and second fishers would receive more tokens but the third fisher earns more from the fish. The same system could be used to keep large, fecund females in the water to help replenish stocks and act as a source of fish for the fishery.
Who would pay for the tokens? If there is no demand/regulation for traceability for a particular fish species Fishcoin tokens would probably not come from a 1st receiver buyer. Although if part of a Fishery Improvement Project (FIP) there is a chance a premium in the form of tokens could be paid for the fish if the 1st receiver could sell it to a market that pays a premium for sustainability and/or rewards the 1st receiver with tokens for traceability.
However, given the very low cost and the food security this could bring, governments, research institutes or foundations could pay for the tokens until the value of protecting and growing the resource could be understood by the fishers, and whereby the fishers are eventually rewarded with access rights or quotas. At this point the fishers would self-regulate and could introduce practices such as minimum/maximum landing sizes etc.
Hopefully we can achieve what Hoefnagel et al discussed in their 2006 paper as a decentralization and bottom-up style of fisheries management — some two years before “Hitoshi Nakamoto’s” paper on a peer-to-peer electronic cash system based on decentralised ledger technology.
One final note. The people of Lombok suffered four very large earthquakes in August this year, followed by more than 1500 aftershocks. It is times like these when power is lost and cold storage systems fail that being able to catch fresh fish each day becomes much more important. We wish the people of Lombok a speedy recovery and rebuilding of their lives. And we hope to one day help in the rebuilding of the fish stocks together with the artisanal fishers of the island.
Hoefnagel, E., Burnett, A. & Wilson, D.C. (2006) The knowledge base of co-management (Chapter 4), Development in Aquaculture and Fisheries Science, (36):85–108
