Pending fisheries collapse? - I pit those who don't see this as a problem

The BBQ Pit
21

I wish the people studying these trends would take the time to study a bit of economics at the same time.

What happens when fish become more scarce? The price of them goes up. People buy less of it. The market shrinks to match the value of the existing population.

As an example, I can remember when Cod was the fish of choice in just about everything. Fish and Chips were Cod. You could get little Cod snacks in the frozen food section. Cod was cheap and ubuitous.

Then Cod started to become scarce, and now most Fish and Chips packages use Haddock or some other fish. Cod is now expensive, and cheaper alternatives are displacing it.

If you really want to help the fish stock, you’ll help let the market work. Lobby to end fishing subsidies. One of the reasons Eastern Canada’s fish stocks are so depleted is because we continue to subsidize the fishing industry long after the market would have caused it to shrink dramatically.

There are exceptions to the market working, however. For the market to work, it presumes that there are alternatives, and that the fish population is large enough and healthy enough to be able to rise and fall in size with market demand. It also assumes that the cost of fishing goes up when the size of the fish population dwindles. In a few cases, this isn’t true. Some island economies have no alternatives to their fish. Some populations (I’m looking at you, whales) may be small enough, and an individual catch profitable enough, that there will always be incentive to hunt them, and the loss of even a few individuals may damage the ecology.

Another problem is the lack of property rights. When there’s no personal downside to harvesting as many fish as you want (if you don’t, someone else will), you can get overfishing. The market still works, but the mechanism is a little more draconian, because conservation and husbandry are removed as tools to regulate the market.

If we can figure out a way to provide ownership of fishing areas, we won’t have a problem. For example, we are in no danger of running out of cows.

22

And those cheaper alternatives will become scarce, and they’ll move on to the next alternative, and that too will become scarce, long before cod stocks rebound to, say, their 1970s levels.

Remember orange roughy? We ran through the world’s catchable supply in about a decade.

I don’t see how the market works here, unless you define ‘works’ as ‘when we’re finally fishing out the last species worth eating that can be fished on an industrial scale, then the price of fish will climb like crazy.’ But then it’ll be too late for ‘the market’ to be of much use for a good long time.

I believe that’s what’s called a market failure, a situation where letting the market work leads to an obviously bad outcome.

Fishing subsidies may make a difference at the margins, and I’m all in favor of getting rid of them, but it’s hard to see that such subsidies are the driving force behind the successive decimation of fisheries.

In addition to the problems that Kimstu has already pointed out, look at it this way: the oceans cover 7/10 of the world’s surface, and already comprise an ideal habitat for the fish that live there, because they’ve evolved to thrive in that habitat.

Where, exactly, are we going to re-create an environment sufficient to support similar fish stocks to that which the oceans currently provide for free, and how much will it cost?

It’s somewhat analogous to terraforming Mars v. preserving the terraforming of Earth. It would surely be a lot less costly to not destroy the abundance of the oceans in the first place than to re-create that abundance in some sort of controlled environment on or immediately adjacent to land.

23

Uhhh, cite?

24

We eat orange roughy. When they are gone cod. We wind up all eating smelt while the other species try to restock themselves. Sure that’ll work. The price will raise and the rich will eat what they want. But fish have sustained a lot of populations for many years. What happens to them? Not rich ,you must die. Try raising cattle on an island when you’ve never done it before. Sheer sophistry.

25

An interesting thread. When faced with studies like this, I did what I usually do, which is to do a bit of research myself.

The FAO maintains an absolutely superb data site here. Doing a search for total fish captured (as opposed to farmed) shows that the world fish capture has been essentially flat at about 70 million tonnes since 1986. This is about twice what it was in the sixties, so the idea that we have vastly increased our catch is untrue. Also, it is not true that total catch is dropping.

Having said that, the oceans are not without their problems. These fall into two groups, system-wide, and species-specific.

System-wide, the problems are:

  1. Pollution. This obviously is greater in some areas than others, and hits certain species more than others, but is a world-wide problem.

  2. Plastics. These don’t degrade in the ocean, and can be lethal to marine life. I spoke last year with a woman whose job it was to recover pieces of drift net which had broken loose and drifted onto the Northwest Hawaiian Islands (French Frigate Shoals, etc.) She said they remove 80 tonnes of nets every year.

  3. Habitat destruction. The main, number one cause of this is the use of trawl nets, which are dragged across the bottom and destroy everything in their path.

  4. Overfishing of the top predators. The creatures at the top of every food chain, on land or at sea, are a key to the health of the ecosystem. Removing them is a very bad thing.

Species-specific, the main problems are:

  1. Overfishing. Different species can sustain different levels of fishing pressure, depending on their breeding rates, growth rates, other predators, etc. There is a concept in fisheries management called “MSL”, the maximum sustainable level of predation. This is the amount of fish that can be removed annually without depressing the stock levels. It is very difficult to determine this number.

  2. See #1.

Fisheries management is very difficult for several reasons.

a) Unlike the land, large swings in populations are very common. Fish lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, of which only a few survive. A very small, often undetectable change in conditions (ocean currents, salinity, food availability, etc) can bring about a huge change in the numbers of a particular species.

b) They live underwater in the ocean, often travel hundreds or thousands of miles in their lifetimes, and thus are very difficult to observe.

c) Fish don’t have passports, so they move from one jurisdiction to another without notifying the authorities. This makes fishery regulation problematic.

d) We don’t understand the life-cycle of many species in great detail.

e) They are subject to ocean-wide changes, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, in poorly understood ways.

As a person who has spent a good chunk of his life as a commercial fisherman, I found the report somewhat simplistic and overhyped. However … I suppose this is a good thing, if it increases people’s awareness.

The danger of this approach, of course, is that if the hyped over-warnings don’t come true, people jump to the opposite conclusion, that there are no problems. This is just as bad …

w.

PS - don’t want to hijack the thread, but I’m happy to answer questions about commercial fishing. My commercial fishing experience has been:

  1. Lampara net fishing for pompano, Santa Cruz, California

  2. Lampara net fishing for anchovies and squid, Cannery Row, California

  3. Bait boat fishing for albacore, California

  4. Beach seine fishing for perch, California

  5. Gill net fishing for roe herring, San Francisco Bay

  6. Trolling for salmon, West Coast US

  7. Purse seine fishing for roe herring, Bering Sea

  8. Gill net fishing for salmon, Bering Sea

  9. Sport salmon fishing guide, Kenai River, Alaska

I have also traveled and lived around the world, and observed and participated in local fisheries on a “c’mon along” basis.

26

How the heck does that lead to the market’s invisible hand preventing overfishing? As stocks shrink, prices rise due to decreased supply. The higher prices, far from discouraging overfishing, actually encourage it (until the stocks collapse and the fishery ceases to be feasible). It’s a very straightforward tragedy of the commons.

27

Fish prices will not increase forever. I love me some mackerel, but at $8/pound, I’ll settle for some beef.

Eventually, as the resource becomes rarer, the price of extracting it will increase and demand will be reduced.

28

Plus, you need to remember that the fisherman is at the bottom of the food chain, and margins are very thin. Price increases at the retail end become the incredible shrinking increase at the fisherman’s end. (Or fisherwoman’s end, some of the best I’ve known have been women).

Many fisheries have been teetering on the edge of unprofitability for a while now, which forces out the poor fishermen.

w.

29

I don’t eat fish.

You fish people stay away from my cows and chickens.

30

Absolutely. But that won’t ever lead to prices that drop. When you cut supply, the new equilibrium price is always higher. The fact that you’ll switch to beef at some point merely indicates that demand for fish is elastic.

You mean, like cod on the Grand Banks? That’s exactly the point.

31

Human consumption, based on purely market forces, will always put stress on the population of a species like sardines. It’s how market forces work. Greater demand leads to lower populations, which leads to higher costs, which leads to lower demand, which leads to higher populations . . . . The pressure is always downward. And because market forces really don’t discriminate (money being neutral), these forces will tend to rate limit the oceanic envirnoment. The takeaway here is that this method of management gambles hugely on the idea that oceanic habitats can survive being managed in this manner. I believe it is more likely that significant portions of the oceanic environment won’t survive this type of management. Capitalism as a simple management technique works wondrously well in many circumstances; the environment is not one of those circumstances. It needs a significant amount of tempering. If folks were able to monetize the urge to regulate environmental issues, we might have a truly functional system. As it stands, we have a ‘ghost’ market in which market force management leads to excess, which depresses the market and engenders regulation, which in turn leads to improvement (more likely status quo, I suppose), which in turn leads to calls to de-regulate, etc. . . .

Anyway, I have two children dragging me away and I’m losing my train of thought (my hold on which was tenuous at best anyway). Let’s limit fishing and let’s see what happens, economically.

CJ

32

I think your post is pretty insightful, but would you care to elaborate on this claim? I suppose the way I see it is that it’s virtually impossible for us to fish any fish to extinction, only to a collapsed state of a fishery. There will always be plankton at the bottom of the chain (excluding pollution or other system-wide factors identified by intention’s excellent post) so I don’t see how it can take more than 50 years or so for the system to move back to its natural equilibrium point.

33

I wish economists and those who fashion themselves as such would take the time to actually study ecology. Because market forces don’t drive conservation, at least not in a capitalist society. I’m trying to think of an instance of the market regulating itself so that it is less consumptive. Maybe you have an example handy, Sam Stone?

As noted above, fish populations are not evenly distributed. A fishing vessel in the northeast Atlantic may score a record-breaking haul while simultaneously a fishing vessel five thousand miles away scores a record low. Do these vessels serve the same market? No. The markets along the northeast Atlantic are manic over their bumper crop, while the markets five thousand miles away are depressed, sleepy. Until next year, when the areas of upwelling will inevitably shift. Meanwhile, those fishing vessels in the northeast Atlantic have blindly impacted hundreds of populations, devastating the last of what was left. The folks running the vessel, of course, don’t know this (or care) because all what’s important is what is in the trawl now. It’s the scientists’ job to deliver the dour forecasting.

The million dollar question: Have cod numbers started to return since we’ve started to feed lower on their food chain?

More importantly, should we expect them to, based on the data we’ve collected and based on our knowledge of ecology?

I don’t know hard we’ve hit the cod fisheries (I’m guessing quite hard), but I’m not waiting for economists to tell me how bad it is, unless they are figuring into their models how far current fisheries are from their minimum population sizes. If North Atlantic cod is still being sold on the market when its no longer at a viable population size (it could be in the thousands and still not be viable, by the way), even if it’s for a million dollars per pound, then it doesn’t matter. That fishery is gone forever. The problem is that it is very difficult for us to get a good census on how many of anything is out in the ocean. By the time we’ve gathered, analyzed, and reviewed the data, we’re only looking at what happened in the past, rather than what is happening right now. Meanwhile, the market is chugging along willfully blind, the consumers forking over whatever so they can get their lemon-grilled catch of the day and the capitalists accomodating them every which way they can.

Unless someone can figure out how to train fish to swim within invisible borders, I fail to see how meting out ocean real estate solves the problem. Unless you’re talking about putting in a bunch of Marine Protected Areas.

34

The tragedy of the commons is illustrating what happens to common property without clearly delineated property rights. The solution to the tragedy is to privatise the commons so that someone has an incentive to conserve the scarece resource. It doesn’t work here because there isn’t any way to assign enforcable property rights to fish.

35

Remember the “ocean” on the American praire teeming with buffalo ? They nearly went extinct many years ago, but we are not exactly experiencing a shortage of bovine meat today are we ?

The future is in fish farming which has become a major industry.

36

I know it’s kind of hard to understand, but here’s an example that might make it clear.

Let’s say the planet is suddenly attacked by an alien force of giants (I’m picturing Godzilla-like creatures). They take away our heavy autillary, as a way to keep us helpless, and then over time they harvest us with giant nets, scooping us up by the hundreds at a time. We’re good enough at hiding, however, so that they can’t obliterate us all at one time. And they’re kind enough not to be too greedy.

But after a hundred years of this craziness, finally they decide their catch per unit effort is too low to merit intergalatic travel costs. But a glance at Earth indicates that there are still humans on the planet. The average density of humans is 2 individuals per 100 square miles. Quite low, to be sure, but not extinct…

Yet.

The Godzillas wiped out our transportation and communication systems, so it’s not like we can agree to all meet up at the local Starbucks. How does that ripe young woman meet up with that ripe young man and make wild passionate love under such a condition? Those who manage to hook up will have offspring that will have will have a hard time finding a mate, or they will end up mating with each other. Siblings having children? Not a good idea. Chances are that on a desolate planet lacking modern amenities (like clean water), 2 individuals per 100 square miles will die of SOMETHING before they even think about reproducing, making it that much harder for the population to sustain itself. It won’t take long for the population density to decline dramatically.

It’s safe to say that at such a population size (within the conditions of the scenario), humans would be technically extinct even though they wouldn’t be numerically extinct. The same would apply to greatly impacted fisheries. You can haul a cod up occassionally and rejoice at your blessings, but that doesn’t mean the population isn’t at code red. If you’re waiting for the population to reach zero before you put up the warning flags, it’s already too late.

37

For anyone interested, the Monterey Bay Aquarium puts out a seafood guide showing the most sustainable fishes by species, method of production, and region. It is downloadable as a PDF as well.

38

I am not of the mind that human’s are entitled to everything around them as a resource to be exploited.

The potential problems go far beyond what will be on the menu, how much it cost, and the impact on Joe Fisherman’s ability to keep earning a living. But it is much more likely to get people’s attention by over-simplifying things. The problem is, if the ocean ecology issues aren’t introduced soon enough to the general public, and sufficiently comprehended, then we’re likely to paint ourselves (and the global ecosystem) into a smaller and smaller corner, one species/habitat at a time.

Aquaculture and the free market are not the solutions, they are enablers, and dangerous ones at that.

39

Are you saying the end justifies the means? That it’s okay that buffalo were slaughtered in the thousands because now we have cows? In the extreme, that would be like saying it’s okay if someone kills your children because, after all, there are plenty of dogs to adopt. Farmed fish may be the future, but it tastes like shit. It should only be the future because it’s cheap, not because we’ve killed the oceans.

40

Nitpick: don’t underestimate the slaughter. Millions upon millions of buffalo were destroyed in that orgy of violence.