• The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.43-57
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• 2012

According to the result of the recent survey on the current condition of loss of the fishing gears in the East, West and South seas, it is estimated that 50% of the fishing gears used for coastal trap and gill net fisheries are lost every year and 20~30% of those used for inshore trap and gill net fisheries are lost. It is reported that such loss of fishing gears leads to the loss of about 10% of 1.7M tons of the total annual catch from the gill nets and traps along the country's coasts and shores, which amounts to 15~170K tons. Submerged marine litters that have recently been accumulated because of the washed out or lost fishing gears significantly affect the development of fisheries resources as well as the natural environment. The purpose of this study is to identify the damages that the ever-increasing submerged marine litters of washed out fishing gears would have on the fishery and to analyze the effects of the coastal and inshore submerged marine litter collection business on the fishery management. For this, the economic analysis was carried out for the coastal and inshore submerged marine litter collection business based on the fishermen's expenses and earnings and their catch. The result of the analysis shows that the submerged marine litter collection business is quite effective in certain areas but rarely effective in other areas. However, taking into consideration that the litter collection would contribute to protecting the marine environment as well as the fisheries resources, it is expected to have a significant impact on the protection of the marine environment even in those areas where it is not effective for the protection of the fisheries resources.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.54-65
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• 2012

While fishery has been continuously suffering from deteriorating economic feasibility, the amount of the deposited marine litter has been increasing due to an increased number of marine leisure tourists which are caused by an improved quality of life and five-day work week. In addition, the fishery area has been reduced by the reclamation projects and it is being destroyed by marine pollution with a variety of contaminants coming from land and sea. To protect and improve fisheries in these poor conditions, Korean governments have implemented the submerged marine litter collection projects. However, previous research results on the marine environment and resources indicate that it requires a lot of time investment to achieve tangible results of such improvement. The 300 billion won marine environment and resource investigation project has been executed since July 2004 by Korean governments, which demands strategic approaches to obtain more effective and satisfactory results before the project expires in 2013. Ocean environment research institutes and governments need to cooperate each other to gain efficient and reasonable achievement by identifying and linking related projects. This study suggests that the marine environment and resources investigation projects should run parallel with the submerged marine litter collection projects on mutually agreed research items in the identical area of the ocean to obtain cost-effective improvement of marine environment and fishery conditions.