May 14, 2013 — Commercial fishing is a multi-billion dollar industry. It's an important part of American life and American culture, going back centuries. Nevertheless, the federal government still has not figured out how to get it right. As Congress prepares to consider the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that governs fisheries management, they should consider ways to better incorporate free-market, private conservation principles into the regulatory regime.
Currently, the industry is mostly still heavily regulated in a one-size doesn't fit all manner, subsidized by taxpayers, and vulnerable to economic downturns as well as what the insurance industry likes to call "acts of God." Likewise, America's fishermen are, quite literally, up against the world as the global economy grows, with more and more countries able to put large fishing fleets in the water without concern for the environmental impact of over fishing.
Research suggests that the free-market approach will not only help preserve America's commercial fishing industry but will make it stronger. As I have previously written, scholar Michael DeAlessi offered some initial ideas in Fishing for Solutions that, over the past ten years, have been partially enacted in U.S. policy as individual fishing quotas or "catch shares."
The idea is simple: give fishermen an ownership stake in a particular fishery through the assignment of tradeable quotas. This invests individual fishermen with the responsibility for managing each fishery. Common sense dictates that they will therefore work to maximize their own personal benefit, improving the sustainability of the fishery and working against measures that will deplete the fishing stock, because it is in their long-term self-interest to do so.
Critics of this approach deride it as a sea-borne version of "cap and trade," the unpopular idea of commoditizing greenhouse gasses in the hope that market forces will limit their emission in industrial societies. Yet the two approaches, while similar, are different for one very basic reason: fish are a real and tangible commodity, one that has value because people believe it does — and the market demonstrates that they do — without the government have to establish an artificial structure to give them value.
A person who is hungry and so inclined understands innately that a fish may be used to satisfy that hunger. And that the person who provides that fish must be compensated for their time and labor in bringing it to market in exchange for satisfying that hunger. The same cannot be said for carbon emission, which have little to no value unless the government assigns one to them in order to establish a bookkeeping scheme to regulate the behavior of industry.
Read the full opinion piece at the Huffington Post