The Construction of a Bioeconomic Model of the Indonesian Flying Fish Fishery

The high price of flying fish eggs in Japan encourages South Sulawesi fishermen in Indonesia to harvest increasing quantities of eggs every year. Similarly, the increasing local demand for flying fish encourages Indonesian fishermen to use gill nets to catch more fish. As a consequence of this increasing quantity of eggs harvested and fish caught, Indonesia has become concerned about the overexploitation of the flying fish population. Thus far policy suggestions concerning the management of the flying fish fishery have been based on a static biological model, since the data needed to construct a dynamic bioeconomic model are very limited. This paper presents a method for constructing a dynamic bioeconomic model of the Indonesian flying fish fishery with very limited data on the fish population. A calibration technique is developed to build the dynamic biological model.