From the BBC: “Ownership key to saving fisheries.”
The study from Science magazine reinforces the importance of property rights in creating capital values, which induce people to take into account the impact of their behavior on the future:
He said there was also evidence that some stocks had recovered from a severely depleted state after adopting an ITQ-based management.
“In places without catch shares, fishermen will often lobby managers to increase the quotas,” he told BBC News.
“But in fisheries with catch shares I have come across situations where they lobby managers to decrease the catch, because they know that if they back off this season, the stock will grow to a level where they can increase the harvest next time around.”
Future fish have a present value when they have a capitalized value, and when not, not. The issue for environmentalists is clear: if you want fishing stocks not to be wiped out, you must support property rights. If you don’t care about fishing stocks and are willing to see the sea turned into a vast watery desert, oppose property rights.
(Access to the article in Science is available here; it requires subscription or a fee to access….or a visit to the library.)
This is a great example of the importance of private property rights. Don Leal of PERC wrote a wonderful study on this:
http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps19.pdf
Nova has a fine episode that shows, among other things, how a marine biologist helped poor third world fishermen develop defensible property rights over seahorses that expanded seahorse populations, catches, and village incomes. It’s worth seeing. The site for it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/seahorse/
I use the economics of fisheries as an example in my classes, because it provides one of the clearest examples of the tragedy of the commons and how we might fix it.
Somewhat revealingly, conservatives seem to prefer communal property and the tragedy. Republican Ted Stevens has led the crusade against private property rights. (Private property rights result in more fresh fish sold, better for fishermen, but worse for big canneries that donate to his campaigns.) And conservatives just seem to get angry about conservation for some unfathomable reason:
http://unforeseencontingencies.blogspot.com/2006/12/penguins-and-conservatives.html