Posted on 02/18/2002 2:59:11 AM PST by semper_libertas
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges."An early statement of Conservation of Entropy!
The more corrupt the state is, the more numerous are the laws.
-- Tacitus , Annales
Wonder if this refers to the ever-courageous French?
I remember my older relatives telling me about what it was like in the depression, after several years, the white tail deer almost disappeared completely, as soon as demand went up. Now that there are managed deer there is a pretty good abundance, but this wouldn't have happened with unregulated hunting, they would have continued top decline. Happened with wild ginseng as well throughout appalachia, harvested almost to extinction, even market pressure didn't help, because with the ginseng being one of the few ways to snag cash in a collapsed rural economy, the older patches kept getting found and wiped out. It's extremely hard to find legitimate quality "wild" ginseng anymore. I'm in the woods a lot, only seen a coupla decent wild patches in years and years of trompping sround, and from reports it used to be quite abundant.
Market hunting/fishing is just that, it's a foraging/scavenging effort it's not an agricultural effort. The worlds wild and healthy stocks are being seriously depleted in the oceans, and with populatiion pressure increasing the demand, it's going to get worse. An unregulated market will just keep driving up the price, as there are enough rich people who would kep demanding it, well past the point of the majority of the peoples ability to consider it as affordable food anymore. Look how close wild buffalo got, and then there's the passenger pigeon complete 100% reality, unregulated hunting and demand wiped out a species in a few years that numbered in the billions, now there really, really, really aren't *any*, no matter what the free marketers might say. The 'farmed' salt water stocks are not healthy, you can see it in the reports, they suffer a lot, the technology still isn't there yet, and probably won't be for a long time. It's an effort to be sure, but in no way would it replace what a humongous ocean sized wild count would be, and the cost would rise dramatically. It can be done, and I'm a proponent of more efforts there, but it's really down to apples and oranges then, it's not "fishing" in the classical sense of just harvesting-only. I mean, it's just numbers, x- billions of people eating fish, that demand just keeps goes up, x-more boats fishing because as demand goes up the price per pound goes up, will lead to "much less fish" and much more effort per fish to aquire remaining in the wild. Where a collapse point is, is about the only thing left to "debate' there, what would constitute a collapse.
Hmm, was reading about the lobstering, it used to be you could go just offshore to get big lobsters, now they have to set pots in water so deep just to get small ones that it would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Try to even just start a lobstering business, it's not hardly possible now.
This isn't to say they are NO fish left, obviously there are, but the studies probably have some good validity to them. No easy solution either, best I can think of is no exceptions to the 200 mile economic exclusion zone. we have such a zone, it's not enforced much, and a lot of exceptions are allowed. That and protecting the estuaries where a lot of the food chain habitat is critical for a variety of species. It's tremendously important to keep what estuaries we still have healthy, because they are the initiators of a lot of the fish we consume, an incredibly important part of the whole ocean marine animal cycle.
Until recently, I lived in the Northeast and the fishing industry is in tough shape. The government regulations that are in effect already have not helped anyone, and more regulations is not a good solution.
My grandfather was involved in the fishing industry (in Boston) for over 40 years and was lamenting the decline in the early 70s. At that point, in time the Russian factory ships were coming as close as 3 miles from the shore and sucking up all the fish and processing them all in one operation. Well, the government stepped in and declared that we have a 200-mile limit. Everything stabilized for a few years but eventually the fisherman upgraded and modernized their fleets. Every one was happy for a few years but eventually demand outstripped supply for the preferred fish (Haddock, Cod and Halibut).
Skip ahead a 25 years and what happens now is that there are plenty of certain types of fish, but not enough of the preferred fish. So what the government has done is limit the amount of the preferred fish that can be caught. Sounds good, right? Aha, not so fast. When a boat goes out to catch the species of fish that arent limited the nets also scoop up a certain number of the types that are regulated. By the time the net gets unloaded the fish are all dead. The Captain of the fishing boat has only two choices: bring the Haddock and Cod in for sale and risk getting fined by the government or just dump the dead fish back in the ocean.
Im not an expert on this issue but watching the fishing industry in New England decline has been painful to watch. Ive oversimplified the NE fishing industry here but I hope that this small amount of information contributes some understanding of the complexity of the problem.
I knew something didn't add up here. The economics of the article didn't make any sense until this line appeared.
Basically, it's saying subsidies have removed the free market's inherent protection of resources. Governments are keeping prices low when demand is high. Of course that's going to lead to overfishing.
This article's recommendations are basically just more socialism. That may be necessary due to Europe's increasing addiction to subsidies. But the most obvious and quick solution would be to remove the stupid subsidies.
People have no concept of economics. There's a steady level of demand. It's not possible for prices to rise and demand to fall. As the supply of fish declines, it is demand staying CONSTANT that causes the price to rise. Sure, fewer people are willing to pay the higher prices, but as long as there are more people willing to pay that price than the remaining supply of fish, it is in the economic best interest of the commercial fisherman to keep going out to wipe out the last remaining stocks of an overfished species, since he's getting so much $$$ per pound.
The original article is a bit confusing regarding tuna. When they talk about overfished they mean bluefin tuna....good luck finding that in your local seafood market, most of it is going to Japan for a zillion dollars a pound. Yellowfin (chunk light) and Albacore (white meat) tuna aren't particularly overfished and can be bought relatively cheaply everywhere.
That's one problem I haven't been able to figure out. Property rights are the bedrock of a capitalist free market. However in this case, not only are the fish not owned until they're caught, the oceans themselves are not owned by anyone.
Perhaps some sort of fish "ranches" established in the ocean would help in the long run. But I don't know enough about the relevant technology or ecology to know how realistic that might be.
You make a good point about schooling behavior assisting overfishing even amid scarcity. But do all the "table fish" (first time I've heard that term incidentally) exhibit this behavior? Or only some species?
In any case, the demand side incentive to raise prices would still be largely intact. Just delayed.
1. You don't have private ownership of the stock. Therefore there is no applicability of of ideas relative to enlightened use of the resources from an owners POV.
2. Your idea that it will self regulate assumes (though I don't think you are aware of it) a random distribution of the resource throughout the sea. But that is not the case. There are a few spots, that can be found where the fishing is still very good, those spots are fewer and fewer, but those who find them can still fish them to death.
3. I doubt COd or Haddock will become totally extinct, but without some sort of private ownership of the entire habitat or regulated management of it, they will be useless. NOte most regulation doesn't work. Depending on the type of fish, you need to be very smart and apply different forms of regulation. For some fish, those that live real deep, a size limit is meaningless, because once you bring them up from that deep, if they are too small and you let them go, they just die. For those situations you need totally ban on fishing for a season. I'm sure you are familiar with the situation with striped bass. They are back, for real, and they really were gone. And it would seem difficult to make a case that that isn't a good thing, or that the government didn't do it.
4. Fish farming is the what the market is proposing to solve this problem. More fish cheaper. As the techniques improve and the ocean stock is reduced, certain varieties will become more prevalent as a farmed fish. As long as we are O.K. with getting our fish from a controlled genetic pool and having no sport fishing to speak of this might work. The market is brutal, it will solve particular problems. But if one of those problems is the idea that the sea should be full of fish that sport fishers can catch cheap, that could become prohibitively expensive to solve. But the consumers of that 'good' have experienced it their whole lives and don't see why it can't continue to be so. The market doesn't gurrantee any problem will be solved at the price we'd all like it to be solved at.
Be careful about applying "free market" assumptions when there is no private ownership.
Rippin
In 1996, just before he retired because "it wasn't fun anymore" (The Pubbies had gained control of the House in '94 and he was no longer committee chair), he managed to ram through subsidies to buy boats back and retrain fishermen.
Socialists always screw the pooch.
Very much so! The only problem now is the relative lack of larger bass, but that is starting to get better.
What a lot of people don't realize is the greatest threat now is the overfishing of forage. The menhadden reduction boats have decimated one of the main sources of food for many of the sport/food fish in the northeast. Bluefin tuna have just about abandoned the NY Bight since the commercials just about eliminated the white hake (whitting) in the region. The hake were the main source of food for the bluefins in the 'Mudhole' right off the coast of NJ. Now if a couple dozen giants are caught each season that is a lot.
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