In which I respond to Conor’s post on a terrific – and terrifying – essay by Johann Hari, by reposting a now-vaporized column I wrote on fishery depletion for Culture11, over at The American Scene. Here’s the nub:

According to the conditions that prevail at the overwhelming majority of the world’s fisheries, many different fishermen compete with one another to draw as many fish as they can from the water. Even in the presence of regulations to limit the allowable catch, illegal fishing is widespread and often undetected, and fish populations plummet until they reach a level where fishing is barely profitable. As Costello and his colleagues write: “Because individuals lack secure rights to part of the quota, they have a perverse motivation to ‘race to fish’ to outcompete others. This race can lead to poor stewardship and lobbying for ever-larger harvest quotas, creating a spiral of reduced stocks, excessive harvests, and eventual collapse.” The communal nature of the fishery, in other words, feeds right into a tendency for abuse.

By contrast, granting fishermen “catch shares” – renewable, and usually tradable, rights to portions of the fisheries’ annual yields – gives them a long-term stake in the health of the stock. As a result, fishermen with catch shares have intrinsic incentives to keep the fish populations robust and their supporting ecosystems intact: as Costello says in an interview with Science Daily, “when you allocate shares of the catch, then there is an incentive to protect the stock—which reduces collapse. We saw this across the globe. It’s human nature.” Ecological responsibility can’t just be imposed from above by a set of abstract rules and regulations; it is achieved most easily when people have a genuine stake in that which they’re being asked to be responsible for.

Whole thing here.

Filed under: environment, food, government/law, personal