Consumer preferences towards the management of fish escapes from aquaculture: A choice experiment

An overlooked issue of aquaculture development is the disruptive impact of escaped farmed fish on wild fish populations and fisheries. Fish escapes generate economic inefficiencies due to their effects on the marine environment (environmental externalities) and their potential impact on wild fish markets (imperfect information). In Spain, there is no specific legislation defining escaped fish and there are no specific measures to detect and/or inform consumers about the risk of purchasing escaped fish. This paper aims to evaluate the magnitude of these undesired effects by assessing whether consumers of farmed fish are willing to bear the costs associated with the market failures caused by fish escapes. For this purpose, we designed a discrete choice experiment that was administered to a representative sample of fish consumers in Spain. Our results indicate that respondents value aquaculture positively, primarily due to its role in providing fresh fish at competitive prices. Although respondents expressed some concerns about environmental externalities, they support the development of aquaculture. Using a mixed logit model, we estimated that the net benefit of preventing fish escapes ranges between €1.23 and €8.96 per kilogram of farmed fish, depending on the number of measures applied. These estimates reflect the social value attributed to both the environmental externalities and the imperfect information in fish markets resulting from fish escapes, ranging from 2 to 14.3 million euros in aggregate terms. These figures are useful to conduct cost-benefit analyses of escape management measures at public and private levels.