Questions sur la dynamique de l'exploitation halieutique

Whether what is at stake is land-use management and stabilising the economy of the shoreline areas for a good number of developed countries or involvement in food self-sufficiency, contributing to the balance of payments and stabilising employment for developing countries, in every instance, the economic and/or political importance of fisheries management as a business sector is far from being marginal in most of the countries concerned. Thus, from the moment the question of the inexhaustibility of the resources was posed, the desire to manage them manifested itself by the emergence of social demand, peculiarly at around the same time as research, due to the involvement of the researchers in the decision-making bodies of land-use and business management and in the definition itself of the management measures. Originally, these management measures were founded exclusively on observations of the single resource, more precisely on that of its state while under the effect of a fishing activity considered as an illustrative and control variable. This halieutic framework is especially conducive to description, according to a state of equilibrium (or of stability) within which the results associated with an operation are presented according to a stable level of impact of the latter. The difficulties encountered in management led progressively to a change in social demand tending towards becoming increasingly complex by reason of the diversity of the variables entering into the arbitration. Indeed, the existence of sources of variation within the resource's and the operators' environment, the impact of these sources of variation on behaviour and the results of the halieutic operations were observed with increasing frequency. Thus, the need was recognised to open a field of halieutic research. It then became indispensable, to better describe and understand the "halieutic subject", to take into account new interactions, new interfaces, associated with a diversity of questions and issues. Acceptance of the complexity that resulted from it manifested itself by fresh apprehensions of the dynamics of fishing operations, including the performance of the various actors involved in these operations and, of course, the similar evolution of the resource itself.