The impacts of ENSO on coastal fisheries off South America are profound and mostly detrimental [e.g., Jordan, 1991]. Miller and Fluharty [1992] provide a complete analysis of the impacts of ENSO on the salmon fisheries of the Pacific. Impacts of the large 1982/3 warm phase of ENSO on corals, fisheries, and other marine organisms have been documented in Glynn [1992].
Forecasts of tropical SST a year in advance are clearly of direct value to fisheries in the productive regions of Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. While the involved countries are not yet organized enough to take advantage of this information, the foreknowledge of probabilities of anchoveta catches would allow, for example, more stable pricing strategies for world supplies of cattle protein and would forgo the type of rapid rise of cattle protein prices after the 1982/3 warm phase of ENSO [ Bahner-Benedict, 1992].