Reef Madness

How Alabama fishermen are repopulating the sea.

Ronald Bailey from the October 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

An Uncommon Tragedy

So even Alabama's successful artificial reef program still suffers from the well-documented environmental dynamic known as the "tragedy of the commons." This occurs in situations in which any member of the public has a right to exploit a resource. In such an open-access commons, the incentive is for people to take as much as possible before someone else beats them to it. If a fisher wants to leave some fish in the sea to breed, he doesn't because he knows that the next fisher will likely catch them and sell them, and thus gain all the benefits. In this way, the tragedy of the commons results in the depletion and degradation of the resource.

"The tragedy of the commons is the universal, fundamental problem with almost all fisheries nowadays," explains Shipp. Unlike, say, cattle ranchers, most fishers don't "own" their fish populations. So in order to prevent overfishing by interlopers, Alabama fishers go to a lot of trouble to keep their reefs' locations secret. Using the U.S. Department of Defense's Global Positioning System, which uses satellite signals to determine locations on the earth's surface, fishers can get within a few feet of any reef that they've deployed, and their reefs' GPS coordinates remain closely held secrets. Fishers typically rotate among a number of reefs so that they do not overfish any one of them. Often, if fishers see another boat on the horizon while they are over one of their reefs, they will stop fishing and move on to prevent the other boat from identifying the reef.

What's the solution to overfishing underwritten by the tragedy of the commons? "Ultimately, the privatization of the resource is inevitable," says Shipp. Such privatization, however, means establishing meaningful and enforceable property rights. In the ocean, that seems easier said than done. Yet creating property rights in the ocean is not as far-fetched an idea as it may seem. There are numerous examples of how giving property rights to fishers has dramatically improved the health of ocean ecosystems while at the same time boosting the production of fish.

Michael De Alessi, director of the Center for Private Conservation at the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, points to New Zealand, where fisheries were privatized in 1986. There, fishers get "individual tradeable quotas" (ITQs), which give them secure rights to a percentage of the catch of a particular species of fish. This gives them an incentive to increase the overall size of that species' population; the larger the total population, after all, the more fish they can catch and sell. The fishers achieve this by initially restricting their catches to create a larger, more sustainable breeding population. "When they have secure rights to the fish," says De Alessi, "the fishermen have done a tremendous job of ensuring that the fish are going to be there in the future."

Restoring Balance

In March, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), an environmental group based in London, certified the Hoki fishery (the largest and most valuable New Zealand fishery) as "a well-managed and sustainable fishery." The MSC was founded in 1997 by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, the European foods and consumer goods giant, as a way to encourage the creation of sustainable fisheries. MSC will certify a fishery only if it meets its standards for the maintenance and reestablishment of healthy populations of targeted fish, as well as standards for the maintenance of the integrity of ecosystems.

Another example of highly successful privatization of marine resources is in the state of Washington, where oyster beds in Willapa Bay are owned outright by the local oyster harvesters. Normally, fishers can't legally own tidelands, but Washington oyster harvesters laid claim to the tidelands before the state joined the union, so they were grandfathered in as private owners. "They have invested a lot in ensuring that the oyster population is healthy, that the water quality is healthy, and that the oyster industry is healthy," says De Alessi. For example, the Willapa Bay oyster growers proved that area pulp mills dumping sulfites into Willapa Bay were harming their oyster beds. As a result, they were able to get legislation passed to protect their property from pulp mill pollution.

Recently there have been signs that the U.S. Congress is waking up to the problems caused by 25 years of public-sector (read: political) management of our nation's fisheries. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) has introduced a bill that would begin a move toward privatizing some of America's fisheries, including the red snapper fishery. Her legislation would allow federal regional councils to create systems for issuing "individual fishery quotas." Such IFQs could be issued to individual boat captains, crew members, and individual fishers. However, the bill makes it clear that IFQs would not be property because they could be revoked without compensation at any time, and an IFQ could not be transferred or sold by its holder.

Despite such limitations, CEI's De Alessi is optimistic that the program would be a meaningful start to a true property rights system and with it, help for ailing fisheries. He believes that once IFQs are issued, fishers will figure out covert ways to trade them. De Alessi also expects that within five years there would be a black market in IFQs. Once fishers begin trading IFQs on a black market, De Alessi believes that they will demand to make such transfers legal, thus leading eventually to the full privatization of the fisheries.

In the meantime, The Reefmaker's David Walter points out: "We have leases where people can lease ground to grow oysters. Why can't they lease areas where people could build reefs and harvest fish?" Why not indeed?

The seas have been systematically overfished because of the tragedy of the commons. We've learned that the creation of artificial reefs increases the fish population, but they too will be overfished unless we take the next step of creating some form of ownership of these resources. To be sure, reef manufacturers such as David Walter -- and fishers -- will gain from privatization. But ultimately everyone will gain if marine ecosystems are made healthier and fish populations thrive.