In recent years the fisheries community has witnessed the decline or loss of some very important ocean fisheries. This has occurred due to two major problems; 1) inability to predict the future of fish stocks and, 2) market forces on industry and government. Continued research on ocean fish populations has revealed ever more complexity in ocean fishery systems. One theorem based on the chaos theory states that increasing complexity decreases the certainty or accuracy of any prediction. Compounding this problem of prediction is attempting to control harvesting with the tremendous inertia of large governments and over-captilized industry. Industry becomes over-capitalized when new capacity is added to a fleet beyond a sustainable level. After this point attempts to limit the catch of a particular fishery often fail or come too late to prevent collapse.
Industry and government will have tremendous difficulty overcoming the problems of market forces. The development of a conservation ethic must occur which will overcome strong desire for taking more of our resources. Resource collapse due to over-exploitation occurs because we all fail to make the hard choice between conservation and rapid exploitation. Consumers in the United States prefer meat over grains and vegetables as an entree. Fishermen continually improve their methods to become more successful. Fish dealers will pay the lowest prices possible to maximize profits. Retailers will buy from the lowest priced source to attract consumers to better values. Embedded in this market structure is the fundamental human need for food and money that cannot be easily controlled.
The value of the fishery market is a political force that greatly influences government decisions from the legislature all the way down to the biologist in the field. Very difficult decisions influenced by political and social realities are often made with minimal regard for the condition of the resource. Biologists can only identify and document resource problems, they alone can't be expected to remedy them. Biologists are often forced to make allowable harvest estimates incorporating only a tiny hedge against unpredictable events. Then these harvests are often increased beyond the hedge by political compromise with the fishing industry. Over-harvesting during critical periods such as during an El Nino is all it may take to collapse a fishery, examples such as the demise of the Peruvian anchovy fishery demonstrate the risk.
Attacking the uncertainly of scientific studies is a common practice that leads to over-exploitation. Uncertainties in biological data cause whole studies to be trashed as unproven and hypothetical. Occasionally data is often not strong enoght to stand up on technical issues while weaknesses in the data is commonly used to critizize a valid argument. In the process of politics many conservation ideals and ideas are attacked by industry. Stewardship and other conservation values are categorically discredited by stereotyping researchers of the resourse as special interest groups, raving environmentalists, or biased advocators of the resource. These and other tactics driven by the value of the resource may thwart attempts at conservation and damage resource production rates.
Science solely cannot be depended on to find a solution to guarantee that particular stocks will not collapse or be driven to very low productivity. Market forces must be controlled directly to prevent over-capitalization at the onset of a fishery and maintenance of an oversize fleet capacity. The status quo cannot be maintained because our resources have dynamic limits while human population pressures are potentially beyond these limits. Procrastination by industry and government by calling for endless reappraisals of a deteriorating resource will have an ultimate negative impact on the resource and all people involved. Ironically, our political and exploitative system is mowing down our human resources as well as our natural ones and only it can stop itself. We must seek to employ managers and policy makers who are trained to understand biological information, can work on whole ecosystem levels, can anticipate the future, and be trusted as good stewards of the resource. Economics and profit must be secondary to sustainable resource management and so should the motives and agendas of our resource managers. -WV, KK
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