Experience with fish stocks in Peninsula Malaysia over the last two decades has shown that open-access management of fishery resources does not work once the fishing capacity of the fleet exceeds the ability of the stocks to sustain it. Excess effort is an intractable problem in many fisheries. Apart from resource depletion through overfishing, excess effort causes economic waste through over-capitalization in fishing operations.

A broad consensus exists which holds that the basic problem rests in the open-access nature of the fishery resource, though a few such as Emmerson (1980) take the view that open access is but one of the many variables that operate in the artisanal fisheries of developing countries. In the case of Peninsular Malaysia, though, overfishing and over-capitalization have not been caused by the artisanal sector in sole pursuit of an open-access resource, but by the growth of the modern trawl-based sector, and subsequently by both sectors competitively seeking to capture the common resource which happens to be most abundant in the traditional fishing grounds of the artisanal fishermen.

The regulation of fishing effort has been in two directions: limiting access to the resource and siphoning off the excess capacity in the artisanal sector. Any government, as de jure owner of a fishery, can decide to use the fishery to accommodate the unemployed and underemployed and not to generate net revenue, even though the resource is thereby run inefficiently (see Emmerson 1980). However, few developing countries can afford to take such a course of action, which in effect means that the social benefits of providing employment for large numbers of artisanal fishermen are generated at the expense of substantially smaller producer surpluses than could be obtained if the resource were to be run efficiently, that is. by a modem capital-based rather than labour-based fishing fleet.

There are few employment opportunities open to the excess fishermen in the geographical region where they live (the East Coast).