From Where the Tuna Roam ($):
Contrary to what you may have heard, humanity will not run out of seafood in your lifetime or anyone else’s. But as false alarms go, this is a useful one.
The prospect of a world without sushi bars or Charlie the Tuna comes from the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet’s fisheries by 2048 — a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true. Yet the researchers are right about fish being in trouble. ...
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In theory, governments are supposed to protect fisheries for future generations by limiting the annual catch; in practice, politicians are loath to impose limits that will hurt the fishing industry before the next election.
... fishermen have a personal incentive to make as much as they can this year, even if they’re destroying their own profession in the process. They figure any fish they don’t take for themselves will just be taken by someone else. As a result of their short-term thinking, fisheries around the world have been devastated.
But the situation is far from hopeless. Many American fish stocks are thriving, as Cornelia Dean reported in The Times. A quiet revolution has occurred in certain American waters, like the halibut fishery of Alaska, and in countries like Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia. Fishermen have discovered the same tool used by settlers on the Great Plains: property rights.
The reauthorization of Magnusen-Stevens might allow further use of individual transferable quotas. Let's hope so.
These fishermen haven’t figured out how to brand their animals or fence the ocean. But they’ve essentially divvied up the animals just as cattlemen once did. They no longer let anyone with a boat rush out to catch as many fish as he can. Each fisherman has to buy what’s called a transferable quota, giving him the right to a certain percentage of the annual catch. The quotas are bought and sold on the open market like shares of stock.
Once they’ve made these investments, the fishermen start thinking long term. They want to make money when they retire and sell their quotas, and they know the selling price will depend on how healthy the fishery is. So instead of competing to overfish, instead of fighting with regulators and scientists, they make sure that sensible limits are set on the overall catch so that there are plenty of fish left to breed.
When fishermen see the results of this system — more fish in the ocean each year, more money in their bank accounts — they become devout stewards of the environment. The problem is persuading them to adopt the system in the first place. In most places they’re so used to the idea of the ocean as a range open to anyone that they resist having to buy their way into it.
If this week’s scare story changes their minds, it’ll do some good. But one way or another, fishermen will be smart enough to avert the Tunageddon of 2048. This range will be fenced off long before then.