Can anyone explain to me about fish ?

[venta]

I'm a little confused by the current business about the fishing quotas.

According to the news bulletins I've heard today:

(a) fish populations are falling like mad, thus there must be limits on the number of fish caught to prevent extinction
(b) fisherman are up in arms about the quota cuts, saying it will destroy their livelihood

Now, I can see their point in (b). However, (a) suggests to me that if the fishing isn't limited now, their livelihood is going to be pretty stuffed anyway.

But:

None of the interviewers I heard today asked any kind of questions about this of the fisherman they were interviewing.

Now, I'm assuming that the people who work trawlers can draw this kind of logical conclusion for themselves, and, if it were this simple, would be able to see past the cuts this year. Am I missing something ?

Comments

Re: And of course, there's more to it than this...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

price for fish will rise, lowering the quantity consumed.

But why would consumption reduce sufficiently to conserve fish stocks? As you say, there's nothing fundamental to economic theory which says that a resource can't be exhausted. And there's no checks that I can see in this specific case which would obviously make it special. So what have I missed?

Furthermore, problems with overfishing only exist in areas fished by subsidized fishermen - care to show me otherwise?

Are there are any major fisheries which have no subsidized fishing at all? If not, that's a bit of a trick question. However, there is a fishery off west Africa somewhere which was on its way out largely due to unregulated local fishing, and is now conserved with quotas. I don't think the locals were subsidized. Can't find my reference to it, unfortunately, it was a long time ago that I read about it.

It's not really that important though. I'm asking you to justify your claims. I'm not saying I can prove the opposite. It would take the combined efforts of an economist and a marine biologist to study the implications of a completely free market, so I can't prove anything of the sort.

Rephrase the bet above to 'will not be completely wiped out of the fishing areas in question'

I already mentioned that - it won't happen either. The issue, as I said, is whether there will be fishable stocks (where we can probably agree that "100 cod somewhere in the Atlantic with a small trawler looking for them" doesn't contitute "fishable". Unless you try for some extremist view that anything that someone could theoretically do at some exorbitant cost is part of the market, so it doesn't matter whether or not they actually do it).

maintain a fishing industry, largely run as it is, at any cost.

Obviously not "at any cost". The EU bodies responsible make a judgement as to what cost is acceptable. As you're not an EU citizen, the fact that you consider the cost unacceptable will not sway their opinion ;-)