Starrfall on 19/9/2008 at 18:20
Ugh let's talk about something besides who should be president for a little bit.
(
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fish19-2008sep19,0,4419776.story)
Basically there's a study that shows that if you impose individual quotas on fishermen (as opposed to the practice of having a very limited season where it's "grab all you can") you give the fisheries a better chance at NOT collapsing.
Wild fisheries are a unique food source
because they're wild. We don't have control over the wild fish population like we do over food we farm. Wild fisheries are also in more peril than other wild food populations, because we rely much more heavily on fish than we do on wild deer, for example.
It makes intuitive sense that it's better to consistently take smaller numbers of fish than it is to take a whole lot of fish all at once. If you do the latter, then you're left with a period of severely reduced population. If any natural problems occur (like a hit to their food supply) then those small numbers will be reduced even more, ensuring that it will take much longer to replenish the supply. If you do the former, then you constantly have only a small reduction in numbers, and so if a natural problem arises you'll still have more left over to reproduce, and they won't have to dig themselves out of as big a hole.
As a bonus, a more constant supply of fish makes better economic sense: the industry gets more constant work and we all get to avoid wild price swings. It also appears to help promote safer practices, as boats don't have to make risky choices in order to grab as much fish as possible.
There's no question that the world's fisheries are in trouble, so it'll be interesting to see if the individual quota practice becomes more widespread. It'll also be interesting to see how fishermen react, and what sort of impact this will have on multi-national fisheries - especially on the east coast where you've got cod trying to recover and Americans, Canadians, Greenlanders, Icelanders, and so on all waiting to see if they'll come back.
Pyrian on 19/9/2008 at 19:55
This strikes me as one of those regulations that will work for a little while until everybody figures out how to game the system. Ultimately I think they're going to have to go with the old standby a la minerals: creating a limited set of "rights" - including a strict total cap - and then auctioning off the rights on a per-pound basis. I think that's the only solution that's both workable and fair.
Either way, I'm curious as to how they prevent widespread poaching.
scumble on 19/9/2008 at 20:13
Some people have pointed to a sort of "tragedy of the commons" problem that occurs because nobody really "owns" bits of the ocean, and therefore the people doing the fishing have no incentive to look after "their" area. It's like a situation where no-one owns a farm and there is a free-for-all with everyone trying to harvest everyone else's crops. If the fishermen could also be caretakers for the system out of their own interest for having repeatable business, I think that would work out a bit better, because trying to enforce a system usually ends up more expensive.
I've also heard that quotas backfire because often fishermen can't actually catch the allowed amount, and sometimes end up with a larger catch anyway - this means they have to throw back a lot of fish, many of them dead, because they can't land all the fish. A sensible quota system would have to avoid this problem by setting a sort of average fish catch, because sometimes catches are good and sometimes on a bad day, the fisherman doesn't bring back much at all.
On the other hand, maybe the human appetite for fish is just out of control, and dwindling stocks are just our own fault for being too damn greedy...
Starrfall on 19/9/2008 at 20:28
I think the idea is that catch-sharing helps prevent the waste of going over-quota. (And thus the socialism)
heywood on 19/9/2008 at 21:00
I don't see any reasonable alternative to quotas. In this case, using auctions to determine the value of fish stocks would probably turn commercial fishing corporate. Big businesses will use their access to capital to monopolize the auctions and then either squeeze the independent fisherman out of business or subcontract the fishing to them on unfavorable terms. I'd like to see fishing survive as an industry made up of small businesses.
demagogue on 19/9/2008 at 21:06
From somebody who has spent a lot of time researching this issue I can try to sum up a few issues.
Quotas and property rights on fish can work really well if the system can cope with it. (One of my professors at NYU, Katrina Wyman, is an expert on this). Problems with making the system work are:
1. Enforcement. Enforcement. Enforcement. Individual fisherman have a strong incentive to cheat. There are mechanisms like GPS monitors on boats and satellite tracking. But boats are minuscule atoms in massive fishing zones. There are mechanisms at ports, but as the history of port customs shows it's hard to make it airtight. But we know there's cheating because there's always more fish on the market than quotas allowed. And then the fishermen that are playing by the rules get punished the most when it's not airtight, so they feel like saps and there's pressure for them to cheat. But enforcement mechanisms are expensive and add a lot of cost to fishing; you don't want to burden these guys unless you know it will work. It's a kind of arms-race. (edit: Those links show exactly what I mean.)
This is also related to --
2. Problem of the commons (if you're going into public law, learn this problem by heart), related to the prisoner's dilemma & free rider problem. It's a game theory model to explain incentives and pay-offs, and a quintessential problem of fisheries. As more people are held to a restriction on a common good (to reduce their individual payoff by fiat), each individual's incentive to cheat increases (to buck the restriction). But since that applies to all individuals, everyone has an incentive to cheat; but then everybody gets a smaller pay-off in the end. Two classic ways to deal with the problem are 1. property rights (what we see in that article), actually let individual fishermen own individual fish in the public seas, then overfishing isn't just a regulatory violation but theft; and 2. side payments (bigger beneficiaries of the restriction pay some % of the increased payoff to those making the restriction).
3. Who gets to "own" a public fish? A huge issue with making property rights/quotas work is the mechanism that allocates them. It's a regulatory decision. Usually there's a board for each fishery zone made up of scientists, activists, and fishing representatives. The decision for the overall quota is supposed to look to scientific evidence of fishing stocks first (i.e., a quota which maximizes stocks at the highest catch ratio over time). But the science always has gaps and is debateable, and any time you politicize science it creates predictable legitimacy concerns (and concerns about good science and salience). What really makes one "scientific" answer better than another when it's scientist vs. scientist; who decides? Then you have the issue of allocating that quota to individual fishermen. Why do some fishing representatives get more allocations versus others. One issue is that the fishing co-ops become the effective gatekeepers, and their concerns aren't always on the best interests of the fish, and they can be very clubby in deciding who is and isn't allowed to fish, which raises legitimacy concerns. Anyway, then you have the problem of having a mechanism where these radically different groups with different interests can talk to each other, that each feels is fair and legitimate. It's hard to work out in practice; some are better than others.
4. For that matter "owning" a public fish? All of this is on top of the idea that private "ownership" of public property is inherently a weird, non-intuitive concept. This is actually the exact opposite of communism; it's saying typical common property is now an individual's property. Why, again, does this fisherman own this fish in public water? Since the mechanism works well, there's a good answer that it's in the "public's" interest; but it's also to the benefit of private individuals over others, and whenever you get the gov't playing favoritism to certain private interests over others, things get fishy. Some labor groups don't like the implications.
I've talked too much. Anyway, point is, I think most people that are dealing with this issue are getting on board with individual or coop quotas as the best solution to what's really a serious crisis. But there's lots of challenges to get it to work right. It keeps us lawyers busy. :)
Aerothorn on 19/9/2008 at 21:50
Nice to see people talking to this - a friend of mine went up to work the canning factories in Alaska, and she refused to acknowledge or care about overfishing:(
Kolya on 19/9/2008 at 22:03
* chokes on his sushi
jay pettitt on 19/9/2008 at 22:31
This all sounds very European. There be monsters in the administration of fishing quotas, that's for sure. But there is also healthy fish populations, which is good. Unless you live in Senegal in which case we've got all your fish and we're not going to let you fish any so we can protect our stocks of your fish. K? (And yes, Senegal isn't in Europe, if it were we'd never get away with it)
Holy cow, it's also international talk like a pirate day, which is kind of apt.
