If only George Monbiot would actually listen to people

In George’s column about fisheries:

The government’s announcement that trawling and scallop dredging will be banned from half of England’s MPAs is welcome. But this should be seen as the very least it could do. Conservationists have been calling for years for these protected areas to be, well, protected from the major cause of destruction.

….

Such residual fishing should be concentrated in the hands of local coastal communities, rather than captured by the huge industrial combines that, as Ocean showed, are snatching food from the people who need it most.

This would cause the mother of all “spillover effects”. Spillover is what happens when fish and shellfish are allowed to breed and grow undisturbed in protected places: in many cases, as their offspring spread into surrounding waters, total fish catches increase, even though the area in which fishing is permitted has shrunk. If killing were allowed in only a minority of places, far less fishing effort would be required to catch more and bigger fish.

Well, yes. As one of us put it in a little book - responding to George’s recent book complaining about neoliberals - and we quote at length:

To illustrate, Garrett Hardin posed the Tragedy of the Commons for us all. If there is open (which he termed Marxist, or at least Marxian) access then this is fine as long as the demand from the number of people trying to abstract from the resource doesn't exceed the regenerative capacity of said resource. When that demand – or the number of people – exceeds that capacity to regrow then we've a problem. Either some method of limiting access has to be found or the resource will disappear.

So, George Monbiot fishing Cardigan Bay from his kayak is just fine – it's George Monbiot taking a few mackerel. The 3.1 million people of Wales all fishing Cardigan Bay would lead to no mackerel plus some inevitable number of Welsh spilled from kayaks.

Hardin went on to say that there are two base methods of such restriction. We can turn the resource into private property (which he called the “capitalist” solution) or we can use the State to make regulations about who may have what (Hardin's “socialist” solution). He further said that there's no a priori method of knowing which will work best. It depends upon the resource and the society around it.

Elinor Ostrom gained her Nobel for asking – then answering, which is the easier part – a very good question. If this is so then how come we have what appear to be common resources that have survived high demand but which don't have either private property nor state regulatory restrictions upon access? Her answer being that our forebears weren't dumb and social pressure and structure can provide a third manner of restricting access. All can see that it's in the common interest to maintain the resource, this means action to limit demand upon it and we're in a society, or section of it, that has the internal power to enforce such restrictions – something that must obviously include the power to punish transgressors.

This is both true and interesting (not things that can be said about all work that led to a Nobel, especially in economics) but it does come with an obvious limitation. It only works in societies small enough that social pressure will work as a method of punishing transgressors. Current thinking is that this tops out at about 2,000 to 3,000 humans, 'ornery and contrary as we tend to be in larger groups than that.

This now gives us a useful set of rules about fisheries. They are a common resource, they're very certainly under too much pressure to be regenerating, something must be done. The local and inshore fisheries (and Monbiot and his kayak) can probably be left to the locals to sort out among themselves. Taking a bit of extra codling off the beach at Dover or Deal might be attractive as an idea but not if you can't then get served a pint anywhere along the coast of Kent. Mackerel from Cardigan Bay, well, if I thought George was the type to go for a pint I'd have less objection to him.

Moving up a size in fishery this just isn't going to work. What experience has shown does work – and very well – is a multiple approach. Ban truly stupid fishing methods like bottom trawling altogether, have (large) no fishing at all zones, preferably where the mating happens and the hatchlings hang out. Then Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) to the fish populations that result. In essence this is giving a property right to the fishermen as a farmer to his fields. Inheritable, mortgageable and so on – permanent property to the cod to be caught from these waters, say.

The reason this really works is not because that individual ownership (that “capitalist” property right as Hardin would put it) is inherently better, more moral or ethical than government regulation of catch size (the “socialist” solution, again Hardin) even though it's possible to think exactly that. It's because of a technical detail. The most profitable amount of fish in the sea is higher than the sustainable population. When there are more fish out there – you fished fewer of the previous generations allowing them to fructify – it costs less in diesel, lost nets, labour time and dodging journalists in kayaks to catch the fish you desire. Profits rise as a result – the profitable level of a fishery is above that mere sustainable population.

Obviously this will only work if other fishermen cannot come in and scoop up those now plentiful fish – thus the instigation of the property right to the population itself.

This works only where we've already the government to produce those property rights – in the Exclusive Economic Zones and continental shelves around the oceanside nations. Fairly useful, as that where most of the fish are. But not wholly so – there're still the High Seas to go. And there we've not really got a useful solution as yet. We've varied attempts but nothing that wholly and obviously works as yet. Anyone who comes up with a good idea do let us and the rest of the world know about it.

Which is, in so far as the Adam Smith Institute – or any neoliberals we know about – has an official position on fisheries is what it is. For inshore, small scale fisheries, that communal and cooperative effort to make Monbiot's heart swell with pride. Where that doesn't work, at that larger scale, a mixture of state power – bans on fishing areas – and capitalist ownership. That preference for ownership coming from what all agree is the entire dog's breakfast the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy has made of trying to do it via quotas and political allocation of the stocks. On the High Seas, hopefully someone will get back to us all real soon now.

That is, the approach to the problem is wholly and entirely pragmatic. What works? Well, let's do that then.

We are not ideologues, we are pragmatists.

But of course George will disagree. We’re neoliberals, see?