The Case For Fishing Regulation

I read a book by Callum Roberts called The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. I read it because I’m not afraid of facts that might support positions I oppose, even though it’s basically an environmentalist tome about how we’re destroying the ocean through overfishing, climate change, chemical pollution, plastic dumping, habitat destruction, invasive species, noisy ships, and a few other things I don’t remember. It’s almost enough to make you wonder how the ocean is still around, tempting you to believe in what the theologians call “common grace.”

These things don’t “keep me up at night” or “scare the pants off me” like they do the author, partly because I suspect some of those bad things cancel out, partly because I have more faith in the general size and resilience of the ocean, and partly because I have more faith in the ability of markets to respond to incentives to reverse and preserve it (and partly I suppose because of more faith in common grace).

But I found the chapter on overfishing very interesting. I had stumbled on info about overfishing in the past, but I had never seen the case presented so starkly and fully. Apparently we’ve been removing fish from the ocean so much faster than they’re being replaced that it’s starting to show pretty badly; despite all the huge advances in technology and productivity in the last hundred-plus years we’re catching far fewer numbers of a whole bunch of species simply because there’s so few of them left.

To catch the most fish in the long run, you should catch at a rate no quicker than the fish are replenished. Even though it might be easy to catch twice as many fish in one year, if you fish at that rate for too long, you are “depleting” the “fish stocks.” There won’t be as many fish left to reproduce next year, and you’ll have fewer fish to catch in the future – killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg.

But even if you’re smart enough to leave some easy fish alone this year as an investment that will pay off later, you don’t own the ocean, and you can’t really stop someone else from coming along to take extra fish now for greater short-term profits – even though it diminishes the long-term profits for everyone who’s trying to save those short-term profits for later.

This is a sort of market failure that economists call the “tragedy of the commons,” and I think it’s a reasonable case for some sort of government regulation – perhaps in the form of limits on how many fish are caught each year. There are apparently cases of governments doing that sort of thing and seeing some sorts of successes.

Part of the problem is that no one really owns the ocean, which is hard to do anyway because the water’s always moving, so it’s harder to have the property rights that give people the incentive to consider long-term profits over short-term profits. Callum’s book does mention some government efforts to establish private ownership in the fishing industry, and he hinted at its success, though he expressed skepticism at its broader potential. (I’m a little more biased to be optimistic that it could work quite well, but I doubt it’s a workable solution for the whole ocean.)

I can imagine a self-correcting fish market that would not require government intervention. As depleted fish get harder to find (it’s very hard to kill off all of them), their price goes up until demand drops, allowing the stocks to be replenished until they are plentiful enough to be caught again at a lower price. But the market has produced innovations that allow us to keep finding fish faster than price signals affect their demand, so if self-correction has potential, it hasn’t kicked in yet; supposedly we’ve already “reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.”

There is also potential in private fishing in fish ponds on land, and I could imagine prices favoring them once fish finally get too hard to find in the ocean. But Callum claims that most of these fish are fed quite inefficiently from smaller fish from the ocean, so that’s not really any more sustainable. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the industry figures out how to keep the entire food chain in the ponds.

In short, I see a lot of potential ways for the market to keep fish around even if we keep taking them out of the ocean at what is currently unsustainable levels. But due to what seems to be very obvious negative externalities, I also don’t have a problem with governments trying to help things along with quotas, even as I expect the quotas to often be affected by industry lobbying (and they’d be incorrect due to lack of knowledge anyway even without the lobbyists).

But as far as government regulations go, I don’t think the unintended consequences of fish quotas can get that bad. If they’re set too high (as Callum believes some certainly are), then it won’t be any worse than not having any at all. If they’re set too low, the fish stocks would just replenish so much that they could be adjusted later – it’s only temporarily adding to the public good. Yes, the government is limiting short-term profits, but since the fishers don’t own the fish anyway, that’s not much of an intrusion into personal liberties.

I’m probably missing some things from both sides, and I’m definitely no expert on fish, but these are my thoughts after reading that book and thinking a bit about it.