The Tragedy of the Commons

Over-fishing is a serious problem. It is a resource with no "ownership" so the incentive is for each individual to exploit it to the fullest. There is no reward for being responsible and limiting your catch. So you push stocks to extinction. That is what happened to cod off the Canadian east coast. The local fishermen and big international trawlers (mostly from Europe) overfished and caused a collapse in the stock. The fishery was closed in the early 1990s and the cod stocks still have not made a comeback! This is a classic instance of the general truth of "the tragedy of the commons".

Here is a story about overfishing tuna in Wired magazine:

News of breeding success comes with the three bluefin species — Northern, Southern and Pacific — speeding towards extinction, the victim of something close to a marine version of the 19th century buffalo slaughter. In the last 30 years, bluefin populations around the world have collapsed. Fishing fleets with spotter planes have chased ever-smaller, ever-younger fish, catching them at sea and hauling them to shoreline pens to be fattened and killed before they’re even old enough to reproduce.

That’s left the seas nearly barren of breeding-age bluefin. In April, the World Wildlife Federation declared that current overfishing rates would cause an irreversible collapse of Northern bluefin within three years. The Southern is considered critically endangered, and it’s thought that any increase in fishing pressure will put the Pacific on a track to oblivion.

Despite alarm among scientists, however, overfishing has continued. Two years ago, researchers from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT — the regulators of Northern bluefin fishing — recommended a global quota of 15,000 tons. ICCAT officials ignored them, setting the limit at twice that number. They’ve since dropped it to 22,500 tons, but their scientists now say just 7,500 tons is sustainable. The fishing industry has ignored all those numbers, hauling in some 60,000 tons of Northern bluefin yearly. An independent review panel called ICCAT an “international disgrace,” a phrase that could just as easily apply to the management of Southern and Pacific stocks.

Ending the disgrace, however, is far easier said than done. Prized for their tender, fat-laced meat, bluefin tuna are a $7.2 billion global industry. In January, a 440-pound bluefin sold for $173,000 at a Tokyo market. It was the highest price ever paid for a single fish, and an object lesson in how, in the absence of sane regulation, impending extinction increases incentives for further exploitation. (It’s not for nothing that the Italian mafia is now linked to the bluefin trade; one conservation-minded ICCAT official famously found a white lily at her seat before a 2006 meeting.) Companies from Japan, which consumes three-quarters of all bluefin and effectively controls the global trade, have put an estimated 30,000 tons of the fish, worth between $10 billion and $20 billion, in frozen storage. Overfishing will only raise their price.

Compared with such profits, objections by conservationists, or even pledged bluefin boycotts by France and Spain and the United Kingdom, are relatively meaningless. The most realistic possibility for bluefin survival may be fish farms: If they can be raised in captivity, at-sea fishing should become less important, and wild bluefin might finally be protected.

Right wing nuts may rant about "government is not the solution, it is the problem" but the reality is that people follow incentives. For a resource with no ownership, the incentive is to grab as much as you can before some other guy grabs his share. On the other hand, if you "farm" something, then it is in your interest to cultivate and nurture it so that you can crop it year after year. (OK, there can be short term wrong-headed incentives such as there is a drought happening now and your family is starving. In that case you will eat your seed corn in a desperate attempt to stave off death. It is a desperate gamble that nearly always results in death even if the rains come.)

Civilization requires rules. Crazy right wingers who think that the only value is "freedom" fail to realize that if we are all "free" to run around armed to the teeth and "free" to deal with a situation in whatever way we feel fit, this is a call to descend into a "state of nature" which is a war of all against all.