July 16, 2018 — The right to fish could be considered one of the most basic human rights. It is probably a notion that goes back to when we first began fishing, and certainly as a more formal concept when Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), in 1609. However, shared resource systems can lead to what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons. First coined in an essay by British economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833, it refers to the failure of a system where all individuals have equal and open access to a resource. With 90% of global seafood stocks at maximum exploitation or on the verge of collapse, the over-fishing of fish stocks are perhaps the most commonly used example to explain Lloyd’s concept.
In an attempt to avert such tragedies, governments look to regulation, privatisation, and the move toward internalising externalities (e.g. user or polluter pay). In the fisheries sector, governments have stuck mostly to regulation in their attempts to better manage fisheries, and this is mainly achieved by managing inputs (e.g. number of boat licences, permits, seasonal closures) to ensure sustainable output. However regulation without monitoring, compliance, surveillance (MCS), and/or convictions of offenders could be considered meaningless.
Privatisation as a tool to avert fisheries collapse through Rights Based Fisheries Management (RBFM) is becoming a more popular and, arguably, a much more effective way to manage fisheries. As an example, Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) allocates a portion of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to an individual fisher who effectively owns this share of the fish stock. If a fish stock increases, governments can increase TACs and fishers can then catch more fish, thus incentivising all fishers to fish at levels where fish stocks increase or are maintained at a biomass where they can fish at what is known as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) . In the case of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) a fisher can also sell or lease his or her quota, thus the value of their “stock” increases with increasing fish stock.