Sounds like capitalism will be the MOST effective means of regulation. As fish become more scarce prises will rise, demand will drop and number of fishing vessels will drop accordingly.
This problem was long ago dealt with for freshwater fish with the explosion of fisheries and hatcheries that are dedicated to breeding table fish.
Where there is a $$ there is a way. A concept totally lost on most leftists.
Exactly, an equilibrium will always result and self-regulation will occur. This is just like the greenhouse effect (in a way). If worldwide CO2 is on the rise, plants will grow better (that's been proven) and CO2 goes back down. It's like you said, "a concept totally lost on most leftist".
That is not a solution. It is the Tragedy of the Commons. The situation stabilizes with a very small number of fish in the sea.
The goal should be to maximize the catch over a very long time period. That can be done by making sure that individuals own the fish that are being caught, just as the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons was to partition the land and sell it to individual farmers.
I would do it like the selling of the state industries in Russia. Every person in the countries that border the North Atlantic would get a share of the fish. The shares could then be sold to companies. Anyone could fish in the North Atlantic, but they'd have to pay the companies that own the fish, in proportion to their take. If a certain fish stock, say, cod, became depleted, the owners would naturally raise the price of cod.
The way it stands now, the price mechanism is actually working against the fish. The price changes with the scarcity of the fish, but the difficulty in catching the fish doesn't change in proportion (owing to the fact that they travel in schools). (The passenger pigeon went extinct largely because of its penchant for forming the largest flock possible; even the last remnant of the species was hard to miss.) Because the price goes up faster than the difficulty in catching the fish, there is actually an incentive to overfish.
Capitalism can indeed overcome this, but the fish need owners first.
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
Capitalism, or, more properly, private property, is the solution here. The problem is that the fish are not the property of any person, or group of people, so no person, or group of people, is motivated to defend them. If someone owned these fish, you can be damn sure they'd defend them against poachers. They'd also make sure that the fish reproduced themselves.
Africa has the same problem with the sex market in rhinoceros horns. Asians believe that ground rhinoceros horns are an aphrodisiac, and African poachers kill off the state owned herds with impunity. Because no one owns the rhinoceri, no one is motivated to defend them.
While it's true enough that increasing prices would reduce demand, it's also likely that increasing prices will INCREASE the number of fishing vessels, since any catch at all becomes more profitable.
I find the farm-raised Atlantic Salmon to be a most delicious and affordable standard. Our local market had a sale last week on Salmon fillet of $2.99/lb. We bought extra for the freezer. It's tasty and very healthy.
Modern fish farming has created opportunity, profitability, and lessened prices for catfish, shrimp. and salmon. I'm sure other species will be added to the list.
Yeah...Just like the unregulated, capitalist free-market system preserved the buffalo and the passenger pigeon. Supply/Demand curve is irrelevant when you cannot increase the supply in response to rising demand.
I am SO tired of people who don't know diddly about economics making these dumb assertions....
I'm with you on the "prices will rise"...but why do you think "the number of fishing vessels will drop?"
Let's look at a hypothetical situation where there are 10 vessels, each catching 10 fish, for sale at $10 per fish (to make the math easy). That means each boat's revenue is $100 per year.
Now, let's say this causes overfishing, such that the number of fish that can be caught falls by 50%. Each boat now catches 5 fish per year. But if the price rises to $20 per fish, the boats still make $100 per year, and so keep fishing, driving the fishery to even lower production.
This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem. No one fisherperson ;-) owns any part of the fishery, so each person is encouraged to get all he can, even if it drives the fishery to exhaustion. The solution is to give property rights, such as tradeable/saleable fishing quotas. In the absence of property rights, the fishery gets driven to exhaustion, even with capitalism.
However, one way capitalism IS helping in this regard is that "fish farms" are booming. ("Fish farms" are privately owned areas where many fish are grown in close quarters.) These "fish farms" hold down prices. THAT'S what forces the fisherpeople in the wild fisheries out of business (at least for those that compete with fish that are grown on farms). For example, suppose that following year, the fisherpeople in the wild can only catch the same 5 fish...but the price of the fish REMAINS at $10 each (because of the fish farms). THEN each fisherperson in the wild only gets $50 a year, rather than $100. THAT'S what forces the wild fisherpeople out of business. (Unless the government subsidizes them to stay in business, of course!)
"Capitalism" alone doesn't save things in "tragedy of the commons" situations. The solution is to fully or partially ELIMINATE the commons...by providing tradeable/saleable property rights.
Mark Bahner (environmental engineer)
P.S. This website discusses fish farming (aquaculture): Discussion of aquaculture
Interestingly, though this is a World Resources Institute site, they seem (pleasantly!) surprisingly welcoming of the idea of aquaculture.
P.P.S. The oceans cover 2/3rds of our planet, but only provide something like 1% of humans' total food intake. This is a pathetic state of affairs. We need to privatize the oceans ASAP! In fact, I'll bet with genetic manipulation/identification, it would be possible to assign ownership of each fish to a person. That would encourage more people to "sow" fish in the ocean, just like farmers. There's no incentive to do that today, since the fish one "sows" can be harvested by anyone, without compensating the "sower." Capitalism AND private property rights...that's where the magic is.
P.P.P.S. Some may wonder just what "tradeable/saleable" property rights are. Suppose that hypothetical fishery can support a maximum sustainable level of 40 fish per year. You give each of the existing 10 boat owners a permit to capture 4 fish per year, in perpetuity. Since the right is tradeable/saleable, some of the 10 boat owners sell their permits to the other boat owners, and "cash out" of the fishing business. Without those permit rights, there's no way to "cash out" of the business, because you don't have anything of value when you leave, like a permit. The saleable/tradeable permit is what encourages boats to get out of the fishing business, even if the fish prices are high. Rather than spend all year fishing--which is nasty work, by most accounts--for a lousy $100 (4 fish at $25 per fish), one sells one's permit to a more efficient fisherperson for, say $50 a year, and then one gets into website design. Then, the person that one has sold the permit to can now catch 8 fish per year, for a total revenue of $200 gross, or $150 bucks net, after he pays the $50 value of your permit. The maximum sustainable yield of the fishery (40 fish per year) is never exceeded, even if the price of the fish goes through the roof. (Of course, one has to subtract out the costs of making sure that only authorized boats are fishing...so that $150 net is actually somewhat lower.)
This is, of course, a natural and inexorable process except as modified by the government having to raise subsidies in order to keep another industry from "going under", another inexorable process.