Mayette March 27th, 2007
This was shared to CERD through the NFR, everyone is invited to share their thoughts.
None for the Philippines alone, except they should write the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) to release their own catch data and sales data. Worldwide, the following:
From: howieseverino@yahoo.com
Where the Tuna Roam
By John Tierney
Contrary to what you may have heard, humanity will not run out of seafood in your lifetime or anyone else’s. But as false alarms go, this is a useful one.
The world without sushi bars or the prospect of Charlie the tuna comes from the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet’s fisheries by 2048-a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true. Yet the researchers are right about fish being in trouble. Charlie is like the buffalo that once roamed the West.
If 19th-century researchers had kept tabs on buffalo hunts, they could have drawn a similar graph of doom. And if they wanted their study to make front-page headlines, they could have warned that overhunting doomed future inhabitants of the Great Plains to live in a world without fresh meat.
Today that sounds silly. You can get all the beef-or buffalo meat- you want from Western ranchers. But to the first settlers, the Great Plains posed the same problem as the oceans today: it was a vast, open area where there seemed to be no way to protect the animals against relentless human predators. Unlike in the East, the settlers couldn’t build fences around herds of cattle because there wasn’t wood available on the treeless prairies.
But animals thrived in the West once the settlers divvied up the land and ingeniously devised new ways to protect their livestock. They hired cowboys and worked out a system of branding cattle to distinguish their won at roundup time (and also compensate one another when a rancher’s cattle grazed on another’s grass). Then in the 1870s came a technological innovation: barbed wire, which turned the Great Plains from an open range into a patchwork of enclosed ranches.
Today the ocean is still pretty much an open range, and the fish are suffering the consequences.
In theory, governments are supposed to protect fisheries for future generations by limiting the annual catch; in practice; politicians are loath to impose limits that will hurt the fishing industry before the next election.
Like the old buffalo hunters, fishermen have a personal incentive to make as much as they can this year, even if they’re destroying their own profession in the process. They figure any fish they don’t take will just be taken by someone else. As a result of their short-term thinking, fisheries around the world have been devastated.
But the situation is far from hopeless. Many American fish stocks are thriving, as Cornelia Dean reported in The TImes. A quiet revolution has occurred in certain American waters, like the halibut fishery of Alaska, and in countries like Canda, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia. Fishermen have discovered the same tool used by settlers on the Great Plains: property rights.
These fishermen haven’t figured out how to brand their animals or fence the ocean. But they’ve essentially divvied up the animals just as cattlemen once did. They no longer let anyone without a boat tush out to catch as many fish as he can. Each fishermen has to buy what’s called a transferable quota, giving him the right to a certain percentage of the annual catch. The quotas are bought and sold on the open market like shares of stock.
Once they’ve made these investments, the fishermen start thinking long term. They want to get good prices when they retire and sell their quotas, and they know prices will depend on how healthy the fishery is. So instead of competing to overfish, instead of fighting with regulators and scientists, they make sure that sensible limits are set on the overall catch so that there are plenty of fish left to breed.
When fishermen see the results of this system- more fish in the ocean each year, more money in their bank accounts- they become devout stewards of the environment. The problem is persuading them to adopt the system in the first place. In most places they’re so used to the idea of the ocean as a range open to anyone that they resist having to but their way into it.
If this week’s scare story changes their minds, it’ll do some good. But one way or another, the fishermen will be smart enough to avert the Tunageddon of 2048. This range will be fenced off long before then.
Check out Howie’s blog: http://www.gmapinoytv.com/sidetrip/blog
