Planning Fish to Extinction

Soon after (and possibly even before) Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese and Basque fishing boats were catching cod in the Grand Banks, the shallow seas around Newfoundland. By the 1960s, fishers were removing as many as 800,000 tons of cod from the Grand Banks each year. But in 1992, this seemingly inexhaustable fishery collapsed, forcing Canada to declare a moratorium to allow the fish to recover. No such recovery has taken place, and cod remain nearly non-existent in the area.

Part of the problem was that the Canadian government allowed the use of bottom trawlers that scraped the sea floor and destroyed the habitat vital for young cod. But a new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future, places even more of the blame on the goverment planners in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The Atlantic Dawn, the world’s largest fishing trawler, can catch enough fish on one voyage to produce 18 million meals.

These planners used flawed computer models to project the effects of fishing on the cod fishery. The models presumed that fish production could be boosted by reducing the number of fish in the sea. One female cod can relase as many as 11 million eggs per year, so the model builders assumed that catching more fish would leave more room for young cod to grow.

These models were based on a concept called “maximum sustained yield.” This concept assumed that the ocean was like a factory, and if you push a certain lever the factory will consistently produce a given number of fish. In fact, ecosystems are extremely dynamic, so there is no one level of harvesting that is the “sustained yield” level at any given time.

Maximum sustained yield was discredited by a Canadian fisheries biologist named Peter Larkin in 1977. But Canadian planners continued to use it for many years and fisheries planners in other parts of the world continue to use some form of it to this day.

In the late 1980s, fishery planners also drastically overestimated the number of remaining cod in the Grand Banks. They thought the fish harvesters were removing about 16 percent of fish stocks each year. Later, they realized they had allowed the harvesters to remove 60 percent of stocks each year.

Of course, politics made a difference as well. In 1989, the planners recommended that harvesters be allowed to catch 125,000 tons of fish. The Canadian fisheries minister called this “demented” and raised it to 235,000 tons.
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On top of these problems, the Canadians subsidized the fishers, for example by paying unemployment to anyone who worked for fourteen weeks a year. Without those subsidies, the number of fishers would have declined, putting less pressure on the cod.

As English journalist Charles Clover documents in his recent book, The End of the Line, the real problem is not the fishers or the planners or the politicians but the very idea that oceans can be managed as a commons rather than as property. As long as the sea is a commons, fishers will have an incentive to overfish (to get the fish before someone else gets them), politicians will have an incentive to allow overfishing (to please their constituents), and planners will have an incentive to use faulty models and data (to please their political bosses).

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Clover, 75 percent of the world’s ocean fishers are either fully exploited or overexploited, and some scientists think that is optimistic. Nearly 30 percent have “collapsed,” meaning they are producing less than 10 percent of their historic maximum harvests. There are many problems: destructive trawlers, government subsidies that support overfishing, black-market fishing in restricted areas. But they all come down to the fact that none of the fishers have an incentive to maintain fish stocks because if they do it is likely that some other fisher will grab them.

Among the few healthy fisheries in the world are those around New Zealand, Iceland, and parts of Australia and Alaska. In these places, the governments have turned fish into private property, giving the fishers an incentive to maintain stocks for the future.

New Zealand, for example, gave fishers a percentage quota based on the share of fish they had historically removed from a particular fishery. You might have 10 percent, someone else 25 percent, and someone else 2 percent. These quotas can be bought and sold, and fishers know that if a fishery is destroyed through overfishing, their quotas won’t have any value. So the quotas, known as individual transferable quotas (ITQs), give the fishers an incentive to think about the future health of the fishery, not just what they can harvest today.

This solves all sorts of problems. Fishers worried about next year’s harvest will avoid bottom trawlers and other fishing techniques that harm fish habitat. Enforcement of quotas is eased because the fishers will watch each other to make sure that none exceed their quotas. In New Zealand, the annual harvests are often calculated by the fishers themselves, not government planners, and the government merely reviews and approves them.

ITQs have not been adopted for all fisheries partly because some of the fishers themselves oppose them. They fear that the quotas of small fishers will be bought by large fishing companies, thus ending a way of life that many consider romantic. This hasn’t necessarily happened in New Zealand.

But another obstacle is the Law of the Sea Treaty, which declares that all oceans beyond the 200-mile limits around individual nations belong to everyone. Rather than fearing the destruction of a commons, the authors of this treaty celebrated it. Supposedly, a number of international bodies govern fishing in this commonly owned ocean, but they do so even less effectively than the Canadians managed the Grand Banks cod fishery.

Clover’s book persuasively argues that it is time to stop using government planners to manage fish and instead manage them as private property. Some government supervision may still be needed, but since government’s role would be far smaller, it would be far easier for government agencies to carry it out. Only by changing the incentives can we save the ocean fisheries.