Abdicating Responsibility: The Deceits of Fisheries Policy

The imperiled status of global fish stocks offers clear evidence of the comprehensive failure of national governments to provide coherent management to protect those stocks. The universal policy response to this failure seems to consist of nothing more imaginative than the free gifting to the commercial fishing sector of permanent endowments of income and wealth under the utopian claims associated with individual transferable quotas (ITQs). It now seems that the fishing industry is to be entrusted to become exemplary stewards, to become efficient, to maximize resource rent, to stop racing for fish, and to make society better off. These exultant promises are rendered false by the incoherent models from fisheries economics that are confused about the essential concepts of. 1. Efficiency; 2. Economic rent; 3. Resource rent; 4. Ricardian rent; 5. Average costs and average revenue among firms and across an industry; 6. Extra-normal profits; 7. Stewardship; 8. Property; 9. Rights; 10. Privileges; and 11. Property rights. This spurious and misguided embrace of ITQs can only compound the tragedies of past malfeasance by the dangerous endorsement of this bundle of confusions, contrivances, and deceits.