The evidence above indicates that the coastal fish resources of Peninsular Malaysia are being exploited to the point where overfishing occurs, as has happened on the West Coast or where it may soon occur, as in the case of the pelagic resources of the East Coast (see Shahrom Majid 1985). The need to regulate fishing effort has become a pressing one.

There are many ways of regulating fishing effort, including closed seasons, quotas, gear restrictions, restrictive licensing, taxation, and the creation of property rights to the fish stock (see Beddington and Rettig WX4). In the case of the fisheries of Peninsular Malaysia, the regulation of fishing effort was first formalized through the enactment of the Fisheries Act No. 8 of 1963 and the regulations made under the Act. The Act provided for the conservation and protection of estuarine as well as marine fishery resources, but at that time no stringent regulations were brought into force to control the levels of resource exploitation “since the problem of overexploitation of the resource leading to irrecoverable levels of depletion has not arisen” (National Delegation, Malaysia 1976. p. 452).

Two sets of Regulations were passed in 1967 and 1971 under which fishing could be carried out. There were no restrictions on total catch, no closed seasons for fishing, or closed areas for any method of fishing or for the catching of any particular species of fish. Such restrictions as were imposed were directed mainly at the trawl fisheries, which had experienced explosive growth in the 1960s.

The most important of these were the restrictions on the areas of fishing, applicable only to fishing by the use of the otter trawl net (see Table 1). Restrictions were also imposed on the size of fish that could be caught by trawlers, by regulating that the mesh size of a trawl net should not be less than 1 inch (2.5 cm), measured at the cod end.