Fishy business

As a consumer of various products you are automatically part of many Social Ecological Systems. We all buy food, drinks, furniture, etc. and therefore all can be linked to these SESs. In this blog I will focus on fish as it is a subject that worries me. Furthermore during the course Sustainable Innovation and Social Change me and my team took The Blackfish as the main actor of our study and from there on studied illegal fishing practices in the Mediterranean. This really gave me some valuable insights into the seriousness and complexity of the problem at hand.

Ostrom developed a framework which helps to identify relevant variable of an individual SES. Below one can see the different aspects of which the framework consists; resource units, resource systems, governance systems and the users and they are all linked through interactions back and forth.  

Applying this framework to fish the following picture can be drawn up.

First of all the resource units, or fish, are mobile and therefore can swim in and out of the Mediterranean sea, or in and outside EU borders (towards the African countries). This creates a problem later on when we come to the resource system and governance system. But coming back to the RU, the Med is one of the most overfished seas and due to the influence of Calabrian Mafia a lot of illegal fishing is going on by deploying forbidden drift nets. Drift nets were forbidden in the nineties as they indiscriminately catch everything that swims in it, from turtles to shark, from small fish to baby fish, and therefore is a huge threat to marine life and in particular the endangered species. 

When we move on to the Resource system, the Mediterranean Sea, as stated before the fish do not necessarily stay in it. Tuna for instance is a very mobile fish and swims to the Americas. So perhaps the RS should be bigger and extend to all the oceans and seas in the world? But how can you govern that? As the EU through their Common Fisheries Policies try to guard the European waters, they can do little to things that happen outside their borders. For instance tuna is protected in Europe, but not outside of Europe and therefor fisherman were moving out alive tuna in huge enclosures and reporting their catch outside Europe. 

When moving further into the area of Governance Systems a big obstacle is that individual member states are responsible for keeping check of their quota. However due to outdated paper monitoring systems and corruption (catch that is not reported, etc.) official figures are highly unreliable on the actual catch. Also reporting more catch than was actually caught was a popular way to falsify data in order to guarantee a higher quota for the next year as high catch seems to indicate a healthy fish stock. Another issue is that member states do not want to or have no money to spend on patrol boats etc. in order to spot violations of regulation. So all in all one of the biggest problems lies in the GS as a central organisation is missing that monitors everything digitally. 

Finally the users, like myself, want to buy fish in a sustainable way, but sometimes get lost in all sorts of labels. Also for instance when going to a market where fish is freshest it often is unclear how a fish is caught, where it is caught, etc. so how can you then make an informed choice?

In my opinion more has to be done to keep fish stocks healthy and we all have our responsibilities. A global governing body should be set up that sets fishing quota, monitors everything, gathers further scientific insights, etc. to which all nations commit in the same way as the United Nations.

When we come back to our “friend” Friedman and his principles and how these could be put to good use here I am a bit puzzled. As he propagates a free market where the government sets the rules, but preferably not too many of them, I think in the current situation he would be a happy man. However this does not lead to a solution of the current problems we are facing, but a continuation of business as usual. The thing I was proposing of the global governing body would be a nightmare for Friedman as he states that concentrated power threatens individual freedom and that is exactly what we want to achieve in a way. I would like that there is no more choice for sustainably caught fish and unsustainable caught fish and the only way to achieve this is by binding everybody by the same set of rules and quota to revive the fish stocks. In the short term this will lead to unemployment in the fishing industries and higher fish prices as demand will continue to rise, whilst there will be less fish on sale. On the long term however this will secure the future of the fishing industry as otherwise they will behave like lemmings and will all commit economic suicide by depleting the seas and ending their business.