It is the last evening of the marine ecology course my wife and I teach each year at a field station in Bahía de Los Ángeles, a small fishing village on the Gulf of California. We’ve invited four local fishermen to join us for dinner, and they sit now in plastic chairs on our patio — the guests of honor, with a dozen college kids gathered before them like disciples.
The eldest of the fishermen, Memo, rubs his grizzled chin in somber recollection, for one of our students has just asked a pointed and painful question: Which species have disappeared in his lifetime?
A sea cucumber in Galapagos, Ecuador. (Alex Hearn/Charles Darwin Fund, via European Pressphoto Agency)Solemnly, as though he’s reciting the names of his own deceased ancestors, Memo begins: the sea cucumbers, the fan clam, the lion’s paw scallop . . . . He’s working his way back in time, I think, moving from the most recently vanished toward the creatures that disappeared when he was a child.
In the early ’90s, he reaches the sharks; in the ’70s, the sea turtles; in the ’60s, the giant sea bass; and in the years of his childhood, the great totoaba, a six-foot croaker that was once pulled from these waters by the million.
As he nears the end of his list, it’s hard not to imagine what might have been: a wildly plentiful eco-system, yielding its riches year after year; and these very men, supporting themselves and their families with relative ease. But instead, they work harder each year, driving their fishing boats ever farther, pursuing a meager haul of reef fish.
What went wrong?
Since the mid-’50s, economists who study fisheries have basically understood the fate that has befallen these waters. They call it the tragedy of the commons.
If a fish population is controlled by a single, perfectly rational agent — an idealized entity economists refer to as “the sole owner” — he or she will manage it to maximize its total value over time. For almost every population, that means leaving a lot of fish in the water, where they can continue to make young fish. The sole owner, then, will cautiously withdraw the biological equivalent of interest, without reducing the capital — the healthy population that remains in the sea.
But if the fish population is available to many independent parties, competition becomes a driving concern. If I don’t extract as much as I can today, there’s no guarantee you won’t take everything tomorrow. Sure, in a perfect world, you and I would trust each other, exercise restraint, and in the long run, grow wealthier for it, but I’d better just play it safe and get those fish before you do. The race for fish ensues, and soon, the tragedy of the commons has struck.
Memo and the men sitting next to him probably do trust one another, and therefore might have been able to manage their local fisheries for their common, long-term good. Not so, however, the large fishing vessels that came here from Oaxaca and Japan. For those foreign parties, which passed through but occasionally, and surely did not know when or if they’d return to fish again, it seemed shrewder, evidently, to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
Around the globe, the same dynamic has unfolded in one fishery after another. Since 1950, the harvests from about a third of the world’s fisheries have collapsed to less than 10 percent of their historical highs. A 2008 United Nations report estimates that global fisheries, currently worth about 80 billion dollars per year, could be worth more like 140 billion — if only they were managed properly.
There are, however, exceptions to this trend. Interestingly, they do not exactly fit the economist’s notion of a sole owner, but rather seem to show that larger collectives can approximate the farsighted thinking and behavior of that ideal agent, provided two key elements are in place: first, fishermen must have a durable rather than fleeting stake in the value of their fishery; and second, each fisherman must have good reason to trust that others will act as responsibly as he does.
A few hundred miles south of where we sit with the fishermen is Isla Tiburón. In the 1970s, an indigenous tribe called the Seri were granted permanent and exclusive rights to fish the waters around Tiburón and in Infiernillo Channel, which runs between the island and mainland.
The Seri are not, strictly speaking, a sole owner. There are about five hundred of them, all with the right to take shellfish from tribal waters. However, they live close enough to their resource that they can monitor its status daily, and close enough to each other that they can catch a fellow fisherman who takes too much when the resource is running low.
With their lasting stake in the fishery, and through their close bonds of community, the Seri have approximated the sole owner: they have managed their resource for sustainable yield rather than short-term gain, and today, Infiernillo Channel harbors the richest shellfish beds in the region.
The narrow channel is easy for the Seri to patrol. By contrast, the tribe’s other fisheries, on the opposite side of Isla Tiburón, are open to the sea and therefore difficult to monitor. Consequently, those waters have remained accessible to all. And, as you might have predicted, the shellfish populations there have collapsed to levels comparable with other locations in the Gulf. The two sides of Isla Tiburón are thus like a case-control study in the benefits of secure ownership of a fishery.
In certain respects, the Seri are a distinctive case. However, small artisanal operations, which are generally based in a single community, compose a substantial portion of the world’s total fishing effort. They employ 50 of the world’s 51 million fishermen, and take half of the world’s annual catch. Managerial success at this scale is therefore a significant and heartening sign.
But what about the other half of the global catch? Two key elements may enable a small collective to act like a sole owner, but one wonders how those same principles can possibly be applied to large industrial fisheries, which take place not in the context of local waters and close community, but over vast areas of ocean traversed by vessels that rarely even see one another.
Even those vessels operate, for the most part, in the waters of a certain national government. You might expect, therefore, that a good governmental manager could simply think like a sole owner, and set the total annual catch at the level that would maximize the long-term value of the fishery.
In practice, however, that doesn’t work. It sets off a race among vessels eager to catch as large a fraction as they can of the year’s total allotment, and there are many harmful consequences of such a race: Fishermen are pressured to fish even when conditions are difficult or unsafe. All the fish arrives in a hurry, which gluts the market and lowers prices. And vessels are built much bigger than they need to be, simply because they’re racing each other for catch. In fact, the 2008 U.N. report estimates that half the world’s fishing capacity could be scrapped with no change in total catch.
A managerial mechanism that seems to work better is called the “individual transferable quota”, also known simply as “fish shares”. Fish shares entitle a fisherman to take a predefined fraction of the total catch allowed by fishery managers. And since it’s the same fraction every year, going far out into the future, the fisherman has a durable stake in the fishery: if the fish population fares well, his shares increase in value; if the population declines, so too does the value of his shares.
What’s more, management through shares favors efficiency. The share-holding fisherman can work when conditions are good and fish prices are high. And since he’s in no great race to catch, he has no incentive to supersize his gear.
A number of large fisheries in Alaska and New Zealand have achieved sustainability under management strategies that include shares. More generally, a recent study, which looked at records from 11,135 commercial fisheries over the period from 1950 to 2003, found that fisheries that were managed using fish-shares were less than half as likely to collapse than fisheries managed in other ways.
Still, managing a large fishery is not as simple as selling shares. Managers must make accurate assessments of the total catch that a fishery can support. And, just as importantly, enforcement must be adequate to convince fishermen that cheaters will be caught. Otherwise, shareholders cannot trust in the responsible behavior of their peers, and the race for fish will resume. In fact, that is exactly what seems to have occurred in certain Australian fisheries that have collapsed in spite of operating under a management plan based on fish shares.
And no matter how well they’re enforced, there is one virtue fish shares lack: ecological breadth. Shareholders have an economic incentive to protect those aspects of the ocean’s ecology that impact the species they fish, but no such incentive to protect everything else.
A broader management strategy, which many marine ecologists favor, is to set aside parts of the ocean and protect them from fishing altogether. Fishermen sometimes resist this idea, since it threatens to exclude them from profitable waters. However, recent work suggests that marine reserves may pay the fishermen back for their sacrifices. By harboring the largest breeding fish, which produce spawn of greater number and quality, reserves can contribute significantly to fish populations outside their borders. Ultimately, fish shares and reserves may prove mutually supportive management strategies.
The waters around Bahía de Los Ángeles have recently been declared a marine reserve. When a student asks Memo what he thinks of this new designation, he only shrugs and looks out at the water. But I think I understand what he means. For while I’m certainly in favor of protecting this place, I also hope Memo and his community will be granted some form of ownership over the waters they’ve fished for years. If a few success stories from elsewhere around the gulf — and the globe — are any indication, granting secure tenure to locals like Memo may be the best form of protection.
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NOTES:
Many thanks to D.G. Burnett, O. Judson, C. Kappel, J. Maximon, C. Palmer, D.A. Petrov, B. Phelan and V.H. Volny.
To support sustainable fisheries, look for MSC certified fish and get a seafood guide for your wallet or your cell phone: go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium site. (Soon, you may be able to track fisheries and marine reserves in real time through Google Earth.)
Fishing practices of the Seri are described in X. Basurto (2005) “How locally designed access and use controls can prevent the tragedy of the commons in a Mexican small-scale fishing community.” Society and Natural Resources 18: 643-59. The Baja lobster cooperatives are described in the MSC report on their fishery. The recent study of ITQs is C. Costello, S.D. Gaines, and J. Lynham (2008) “Can catch shares prevent fisheries collapse?” Science 321: 1678-81. Two good reviews on the topic are J.R. Beddington, D.J. Agnew and C.W. Clark (2007) “Current problems in the management of marine fisheries.” Science 316: 1713-16 and R. Hilborn, J.K. Parrish and K. Litle (2005) “Fishing rights or fishing wrongs?” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 15: 191-199.