WHEN I was young, our family owned a piece of a small lake along with five other families. The stock in the lake consisted of bass, bluegill and catfish, and since the lake was somewhat small there was a limited number of fish.
If we caught no more than a few fish per family each week, the stocks remained level as fish reproduced faster than we caught them. But one summer we grew competitive, trying to catch the largest fish, and with all five families competing, by the end of the summer we had wiped them out. We caught them faster than they could reproduce, and populations disappeared. Eventually, we had to call the Conservation Department to restock the lake and today it is carefully fished, with the total take monitored to avoid another collapse.
What happened to our lake is known as a Tragedy of the Commons, which occurs when individuals act in their own interests but to the detriment of the whole community. For me, and for all the other fishermen, catching many fish was good. It put food on the table and brought prestige. But because the fish populations collapsed, it resulted in long-term disaster for all of us.
The same thing is going on in the Pacific. Fish stocks are being depleted faster than they can recover. Over-fishing has brought many species to the brink of extinction, much like what happened to the Grand Banks in the northern Atlantic a generation ago. Modern fishing techniques encourage each nation to take as much as they can before the fleets of rival nations get them.
While this approach brings benefits to the individual nation in the form of food on the table or money in the pocket, the result for all of us will be starvation as the fish stocks are wiped out. I have spoken with fishermen who have told me they cannot catch what they used to. Tuna are much smaller, salmon are scarce, flounder have all but disappeared, even halibut are tiny compared to the ones caught twenty years ago.
Is there a solution? There are several options, depending on your approach.
Government control. If all Pacific fishing was brought under the control of a central authority such as the United Nations, then they could impose scientifically based controls and quotas. Each nation could be assigned a limited catch and strong penalties assessed for violations. With strong laws in place and a collective will to back it, international pressure would be great to limit the harvesting of Pacific resources. The catch would be sustainable, and transgressors could be isolated and punished.
Collective agreement. This approach would suppose that all countries that fish the Pacific get together and reach similar agreements on catches among themselves with no oversight from the UN. They would decide between themselves who catches what, and they would agree to abide by the limits. This has been the method used in the past with disastrous results. Put simply, the incentive to cheat is too great. If everyone agrees to catch one tuna per week, then the person who catches two makes twice as much as everyone else. Right now, nearly everyone is secretly catching two, and the stocks continue to plummet.
Private property. If every square mile of the Pacific were declared to belong to one country or another, then we could eliminate the Tragedy of the Commons altogether by eliminating the commons. Every country would be responsible for policing its own section of the ocean and each country would benefit if their fish stocks flourished. They would end up with more to eat or more to sell. Either way, overfishing would not be in their best interests, sustainability would. There are downsides to privatizing the oceans, of course, which is why we have not done it yet.
Are Pacific fish stocks doomed to go the way of the Atlantic cod or the dodo bird? So far, this looks to be the case. Can it be avoided? Yes, but not likely, and we cannot call the Conservation Department to restock the ocean.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He travels the Pacific but currently resides on the mainland U.S.
