Privatise the sea

Fascinating suggestion from David Carr as to how fish stocks may be preserved:

The dwindling numbers of marine animals is a 'tragedy of the commons' arising from the fact that the high seas are insufficiently owned. Apart from some nationalised coastal waters, fishermen are pretty much at liberty to trawl for as much fish as they can lay their hands on anywhere they please, anyhow they please and as often as they like. There is simply nothing to stop them. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they fail to husband or manage the species they live off. There is no incentive for them to do so. However, if stretches of sea were owned in the same way as land is owned then not only would the owners be able to bar trespassers but (as with land farmers) they would have an commercial incentive to find ways to breed as much edible marine life as possible for human consumption and resultant profit. Hence the countless millions of farm animals in the world despite the prodigious rate at which we humans kill and eat them.

One commenter raised the objection that fish don't respect boundaries and a "fish farmer" would not be able too erect fences, but I think this is stretching the analogy too far. The important point is not that the owner of a sea farm "owns" the fish on it, so much as the environment for those fish and fishing rights on his property. If the environment is maintained in a "fish-friendly" manner, it oughtn't matter that "livestock" drift across boundaries, there should always be fish in this property.

Comments

[Jon Ihle]

But what about Hoki, the sustainable alternative to cod? The problem with overfishing is that we're marketing the wrong fish! Where I grew up, natives would eat bluefish, categorised as a mere gamefish by the rest of the world. Sure, it tastes like the bottom of a tuna can that's spent three days in a sewer, but there sure are a lot of them in the north Atlantic.

[Frank McGahon]

What happens when the Hoki is overfished? I'm afraid you have fallen into a command economy type argument: managing demand. It can't really be done, Maintaining a Hoki-based fish market with an agreement to avoid overfished stock would be of similar difficulty to maintaining a monopoly, you are at the risk of defectors and all it would take are one or two.

[Peter Nolan]

I don't know much about this, but those smart people at the IEA put out a paper on this:

www.iea.org.uk/files/119.pdf

Also, those very, very, very smart people at Resources For the Future (RFF) have a piece on it too.

http://www.rff.org/rff/News/Coverage/2002/August/Fishing-for-Solutions.cfm