Mystery and discovery in the economics of fishing on the high seas

Fishing on the high seas may frequently be economically unsustainable, according to an analysis last year by Enric Sala and colleagues in Science Advances.

This comparatively unregulated fishing industry beyond national exclusive economic zones presents grave environmental concerns, so the motivation for continued fishing under unprofitable conditions is somewhat of a mystery. Sala and colleagues mostly argue that the industry is propped up by government subsidies, but they also discuss two other factors. One is substandard wages and working conditions, even sometimes modern slavery. Another is the possibility that some countries cheat on their harvest reporting and are really more profitable than they appear. The study's data source already corrects for standard estimates of catch underreporting, so this last possibility might require especially brazen underreporting on a scale that has not yet been recognized.

Fig. 3 Net economic benefit of high-seas fishing (Sala et al., 2018). 
Range of estimates of fishing profits (US$ millions) before (π) and after (π*) subsidies for (A) major fishing countries and (B) gear types.

The 2018 study is part of a blossoming research literature that takes advantage of modern tracking data to estimate the "fishing effort" of thousands of individual vessels. To get a sense of this remarkable type of data, see the online mapping capability at Global Fishing Watch. It lets you track individual vessels as they criss-cross the ocean in both the national exclusive economic zones and the high seas.

I came across this study after watching a video from Greenpeace featuring one of the authors, Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He explains that the decline of fisheries has been going on so long that even adults in fishing communities may not fully understand the long-term baseline bounty that could be possible without overfishing. The environmental sustainability of human consumption of smaller fish is less fraught, but, in the video, Pauly argues that "we are chasing the last of the big fish."

Cod fishery in crisis

The federal government this week enacted what amounts essentially to a 6-month pause in commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, according to a report by David Abel in the Boston Globe yesterday. This is a sad day for New England's most famous fishery.

Cod fishing is a classic example of a situation where free markets would be devastating for everybody, including fishermen and their families. Because overfishing in the past has pushed stocks far below maximum sustainable levels, each fishing boat harms the economic interests of the next. Economists believe that liberated markets serve environmental goals wonderfully in many situations, where property rights to natural resources are well defined, but free markets are a disaster when each producer is chasing a common resource.

Nobody thinks the New England cod fishery should be unregulated. Yet, cod fishermen complain about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regulators who took action this week. Many fishermen believe the scientific estimates are overly pessimistic, leading regulators to be overly cautious.

Here you can inspect the evidence for yourself, in NOAA's report this past August. Using two different models of cod mortality (on the left and right), the figure reproduced here shows the downward trend over time in estimated spawning stocks biomass (top row) and the upward trend in estimated recent fish mortality (bottom row).

Of course, these estimates could be mistaken. Yet, as a non-expert reading them closely, I found them persuasive. If I were a cod fisherman, I would cry, plan, and organize politically, but I would resist the temptation to blame the messenger.

For the other side of the story, here is a link to the Northeast Seafood Coalition, but I haven't yet found a real scientific rebuttal to the NOAA estimates.

In the tragic political division in this country, so apparent in the recent election, the conservative party is (rightly!) devoted to the great prosperity economic markets can achieve, yet sadly unable to comprehend that vigorous and effective government sometimes is needed to let markets work well.