Mixing socialist and capitalist approaches to fishery management

The new sectors are designed to address these problems – to halt overfishing and rebuild fish stocks.

So here's a question: Who cares? Does any of this really matter to anyone besides fishermen?

Here are some highlights from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's most recent assessment of world fisheries:

• Fisheries supply at least 15 percent of the animal protein consumed by humans.
• They provide direct or indirect employment for nearly 200 million people worldwide.
• They generate $85 billion (US) annually.
• 28 percent of the world's fisheries stocks are currently being overexploited or have collapsed.
• 52 percent are fully exploited.

But here's the bigger issue: How fisheries are managed is a nice litmus test for how we're faring as we confront a larger question. Can we learn – and what does it take – to manage natural systems sustainably?

Historically, we've gotten so-called ecosystem services (like fish) for free. We pay nothing except for the cost of harvesting them. That holds true for myriad services – clean water flowing from healthy, intact ecosystems; wood from forests; carbon stored in wetlands; and so on.

But if we degrade ecosystems, we have to assume the cost of delivering that service. We end up paying for what we once got free. That's what a fish farm is. That's also why New York City labors so diligently to protect its forested watershed. Imagine having to do all that forest does to New York's water – clean, filter, purify – ourselves. (And we do do some of it.)

Here's an idea of what we lose just with fisheries. The World Bank's Sunken Billions report estimates that the world has loses $50 billion yearly in potential profit to fishery mismanagement. Over the past three decades, that's $2 trillion lost to world Gross Domestic Product.

So we can look at fishery management as a small case – and it's really not that small considering that oceans cover 70 percent of the planet – of the greater sustainability question.

One more analogy to belabor this point: Scientists often characterize sustainability as learning to live off the biosphere's interest without digging into its principal. If we cut into the principal, yes, we can live like kings for a while. But eventually, we spend it all. When that happens, not only do dividend payments stopped, it may be impossible, at least on time scales humans care about, to reaccumulate the principal and reestablish the trust fund.

Next (click here to read): What do Somali pirates have to do with community-based fishery management?

Previous

1 | 2