14 Responses to “Saving the Oceans…”

1. #1 |  Marty |  June 3rd, 2010 at 1:24 pm

   fascinating.

2. #2 |  Joe |  June 3rd, 2010 at 1:34 pm

   Free market solutions for fishing work and work well. We should have a freely traded catch right program, where fishermen (and women) have a owernship stake in maintaining the resource (which avoids the tragedy of the commons). Many fish stocks should be under these sort of plans. It will mean less fishermen, but it will mean more fish in the long run, sustainable fisheries, and better harvesting practices being employed. And the fishermen that remain will make more money.

   And because sports fishing is so high money (people spend hundreds for the chance to catch fish), commerical rights can be easily leased to sport fishermen (which will improve those fisheries too).

3. #3 |  JS |  June 3rd, 2010 at 2:41 pm

   Actually the idea of transferring fishing rights from commercial to sportfishermen does not result in more, but less sustainable fisheries. As an example the red snapper has reached unsustainable levels not through commercial but through recreational fishing. These results were found by a study by Florida State University a few years ago and provoked a furore among sportsfishing lobbying groups which had been paying a lot of money to regulators in states on the gulf coast to pass regulations that would, in the words of Texas Parks and Wildlife Fisheries Chief Hal Osbern “Socially engineer them out of the bays.” In other words state police forces, were paid by lobbyists to throw thousands of people out of work so that a bunch of good old boys could have the whole sea to themselves and it turns out that the sportfishermen actually decreased sustainability.

4. #4 |  PeeDub |  June 3rd, 2010 at 4:21 pm

   I thought this was going to be about not peeing in the ocean…

5. #5 |  Joe |  June 3rd, 2010 at 4:46 pm

   js, If the rights are owned (be it by a sports fishing group or by commerical fishermen) then the incentive is not to fish it out. The owner restricts the catch to protect his right. The right is worthless if the fishing wipes it out. The incentive is to improve the resource. Fishermen now own rivers where the resource is protected so they can catch trout and salmon. They do not fish those resources out because they have an interest in maintaining it.

   The ownership interest has to be tailored to the species. What would work for lobsters (which migrate a bit but generally stay in a defined area on the bottom) would not work for blue fin tuna (who swim all around the ocean). But private ownership may protect these resources far better than what we have now.

6. #6 |  JS |  June 3rd, 2010 at 6:53 pm

   Joe I’m just telling you happened here. They may have an incentive to not fish it out but that doesn’t stop people from fishing it out by keeping more than the limits or simply by the mere numbers of sportsfishermen. Anyway the story was mostly about fishing overseas.

7. #7 |  random guy |  June 3rd, 2010 at 7:00 pm

   Its always interesting to note the places where free market economics get trumped by human behavior. A completely free market in the fishing industry would have probably wiped out many species by now, a certain amount of regulation has been necessary to maintain an essentially public good (fish in the sea) from the economic incentives to exploit it (scarcity -> higher price -> greater competition for resource -> increasing scarcity).

   But inefficient regulation will be just as destructive. It is great when an unfortunate but needed regulation can be tempered with sound economic theory, like the catch sharing program.

8. #8 |  grog |  June 3rd, 2010 at 7:29 pm

   [...] would not work for blue fin tuna (who swim all around the ocean).

   Clearly, fences are needed! We can’t have good tuna swimming off and trespassing on someone else’s property.

   Perhaps eels could be used as shock collars.

9. #9 |  cks |  June 3rd, 2010 at 8:26 pm

   As much as I like Reason I have to point out some glaring factual mistakes in this story.
   First of all, the AK halibut fishery was not ‘rationalized’ because the fleet was exceeding the overall quota. IFQ’s (Individual Fishing Quotas) went into effect to reduce the race for fish that sent boats out into bad weather and then flooded the market with fish. Now the fishery takes place over 6-8 months and fishermen are free to choose the weather and market conditions that are favorable to them. This has increased the price paid to fishermen and provided the public with fresher halibut over a longer period of time. What has not happened is an increase in the size of the stock. The stocks still fluctuate (There are a lot bigger factors at work than just the commercial/sport catch), and in fact the IFQs owned by the commercial fishermen have been reduced by 60% since the beginning of the program. What is telling about the program is that the commercial fleet doesn’t do much bitching about the reduction in quota because they do have a vested interest in the long term health of the resource. The biggest problem has been getting the charter fleet on board to share the pain.
   Second of all…What a bunch of nonsense bringing the Deadliest Catch into the mix. The only reason those guys have time or incentive to put up with a camera crew on board is because the Bering Sea crab fishery went through it’s own rationalization plan. In fact the Coast Guard quit cooperating with the Discovery Channel after the first season because of the artificial ‘race’ that the network wanted to make the story more compelling. The biggest loser in that plan were some of the communities that used to have crab processing jobs which are now all pretty much consolidated in Dutch Harbor. Either way, any race for crab is purely a made for tv event.
   And speaking of facts…screw those dipsticks protesting eating whales. The IWC quit being a scientific organization long ago. Instead it is a political organization which hasn’t approved a commercial whale fishery in decades. It has become a bully pulpit for those who wish to impose their feelings and biases on the rest of the world. Should we all have to quit eating beef because the Indians object? Must the world give up bacon so as not to offend the Muslim world? I’m pretty sure that Norway and Iceland quit the IWC because it became apparent that the IWC didn’t care how healthy the whale stocks were in those countries’ waters; they simply weren’t going to approve any whaling that wasn’t done by Inuits in skin boats.
   All previous rants aside about certain facts, the IFQ program for halibut and black cod is working well. Casualties of both fishermen and vessels are down and the public has been rewarded with a higher quality product as there isn’t such a rush to take care of millions of pounds of fish in a week or less. So go buy a fish for dinner. And if you buy salmon, make it wild salmon. It’s brain food, you know.

10. #10 |  Rob |  June 4th, 2010 at 4:16 am

    You lost me at 22secs in… you may find the dolphin cull in Japan distasteful, but it’s not illegal. Fact checking is always a good idea.

11. #11 |  Rob |  June 4th, 2010 at 4:22 am

    Of course the “you” is the folks at Reason who produced this, not the Radley Balko “you.”

12. #12 |  Jeff |  June 4th, 2010 at 8:32 am

    js, If the rights are owned (be it by a sports fishing group or by commerical fishermen) then the incentive is not to fish it out. The owner restricts the catch to protect his right. The right is worthless if the fishing wipes it out. The incentive is to improve the resource. Fishermen now own rivers where the resource is protected so they can catch trout and salmon. They do not fish those resources out because they have an interest in maintaining it.

    So? Sometimes people act against their own interests, especially when it’s in the very long term. It’s not something new. Sometimes incentivising the “right thing” works, sometimes it doesn’t.

13. #13 |  parse |  June 4th, 2010 at 8:39 am

    Wait, Collins says that regulations systems fail because humans are clever and will always find a way around regulations and then proposes that we save scarce fishing resources through regulations–just different regulations that the ones currently enforced. But his initial argument wasn’t that a particular set of regulations was wrong but that regulation itself was inherently doomed to failure. What am I missing?

14. #14 |  Joe |  June 4th, 2010 at 10:53 am

    Joe I’m just telling you happened here.

    I am not sure where here is. I am not sure how the sportsfishing program was structured and why it failed where you are. But my guess is there was no real ownership of the resource, which of course encourages over fishing. When the resource is not owned, the incentive is to catch as much as possible (the tragedy of the commons). The bottom line is you cannot over fish the stock and expect it to remain healthy. And ownership also disincentives crazy practices like bottom trawling for cod (which destroyed the underwater habitat of the grand banks and destroyed the cod resource).

    But if you want examples where privatization has worked, cks describes some of it in Alaska with halibut and black cod. It has worked with lobster in Australia. It works with oyster beds in the Pacific Northwest.

    And cks is right that wild salmon is brain food.

    It could work world wide on certain fisheries if it were properly structured and there was some sort of method for enforcement. It has to be structrued for the species (the plan for bluefin tuna would be very different than one for lobsters), but that does not mean it is impossible.

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