Working Paper # 2017 - 02 Ex - vessel fish price database : disaggregating prices for low - priced species from reduction fisheries

24 25 Ex-vessel fish prices are essential for comprehensive fisheries management and 26 socioeconomic analyses for fisheries science. In this paper, we reconstructed a global ex27 vessel price database with the following areas of improvement: 1) compiling reported prices 28 explicitly listed as ‘for reduction to fishmeal and fish oil’ to estimate prices separately for 29 catches destined for fishmeal and fish oil production, and other non-direct human 30 consumption purposes; 2) including uncertainty estimates for each price estimation; and 3) 31 increasing the number of input data and the number of price estimates to match the 32 reconstructed Sea Around Us catch database. Our primary focus was to address this first area 33 of improvement as ex-vessel prices for catches destined for non-direct human consumption 34 purposes were substantially overestimated, especially in countries with large reduction 35 fisheries. For example in Peru, 2010 landed values were estimated as 3.8 billion real 2010 36 USD when using separate prices for reduction fisheries, compared with 5.8 billion using 37 previous methods. This has significant global and country-specific impacts on economic 38 trends over time. 39 40