[PEN-L:29910] over-fishing

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: over-fishing

[was: RE: [PEN-L:29907] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Russia turns to yuan"]

It's pretty basic economics that the existence of so-called "common-property resources" such as fish leads to over-fishing, the depletion of stocks. (For these CPRs, there is no way to define individual property rights unless some capitalist monopolizes the ocean, so they are "common property.") This in turn implies the need for some sort of governmental (or, in the case of the oceans, world-governmental) control to make sure that the fisheries don't undermine their own existence. (A fishery that monopolizes the ocean ends up being very much the same as a government, though not a democratic one. Either way, it's an explicit socialization of production.) Of course, the fisheries lobby like crazy to avoid this kind of regulation: their attitude seems to be one of short-term survival and jump ahead of the competition, rather than a concern with the long-run health of the "industry." Even when there are agreements, there is often "free riding." So we see over-fishing.

Oil has some aspects of a CPR (as with slant-drilling), but it's not the same thing at all.

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Louis Proyect [mailto:lnp3@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 8:43 AM
> To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L:29907] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Russia turns to yuan"
>
>
> Melvin:
> >Lou, in my head I believe that every shortage of natural
> resources on
> >earth is artificial and contrived.
>
> But this is not so. While there have been debates on PEN-L
> with Mark Jones
> about dwindling oil supplies, there obviously can be no
> debate about--for
> example--the decline of fish stocks. This is the reason I
> emphasized that
> expanding the forces of production in terms understood 125
> years ago is not
> the answer. According to the Food and Agriculture
> Administration (FAO), a
> US agency, the present capacity of the world's fishing fleets
> is 200% of
> the world's available fisheries. Over the past 50 years,
> technological
> breakthroughs in the fishing industry have far exceeded
> nature's ability to
> reproduce itself. The biggest change has been the
> introduction of sonar, a
> wartime innovation. Many of the first new fishing trawlers
> were actually
> converted WWII submarine hunters.
>
> In the early 1950s, new ships were built from the ground up
> that could
> catch 500 tons of fish a day. Huge trawl nets brought the
> catch on the deck
> and dumped it into onboard processing and freezing
> facilities. In the past,
> ships had to return to port quickly before the fish spoiled.
> Now equipped
> with freezers they could spend months at sea, sweeping up
> vast quantities
> of fish. They roamed the planet in search of profits. In 1970
> the tonnage
> of all fishing boats was 13,616. In 1992 it was 25,994, a 91%
> increase.
> Capital simply flowed to the profitable fishing industry with
> little regard
> to the long-term consequences.
>
> One of the consequences of the industrial trawling model is that
> large-scale production techniques generate huge amounts of
> waste. The nets
> draw unwanted species that are simply discarded. The FAO
> estimates that
> discarded fish total 27 million tons each year, about 1/3 of
> the total
> catch. This includes sea mammals, seabirds and turtles. While
> Greenpeace
> activists fight for the life of the unfortunate porpoise, many other
> species are disappearing without fanfare. The loss is serious
> since all of
> these species interact with each other in the marine
> ecosystem and make
> natural reproduction possible.
>
> All of these new technologies, from freezing to sonar, simply
> lead to the
> more rapid exhaustion of a key natural resource, namely
> seafood and fish.
> The wing of the socialist movement that has retained a kind of
> techno-optimism often tends to equate the need for environmental
> sustainability with Malthusianism, Luddism, romantic reaction or even
> green-Fascism. Obliviously socialism can solve lots of
> problems. But it
> cannot repopulate the oceans with Bluefin Tuna once they are extinct.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> www.marxmail.org
>