This is one of those examples where the cake is shrinking so everybody will get a smaller piece. Now if all participants would cooperate the cake could be made to grow. But this will afford people to not take as big of a piece as possible for a while. And because nobody trusts each other, every participant instead focuses instead on keeping the future pieces at least as large as they used to be which means taking relatively speaking an increasingly large chunk. And that's not sustainable so everything breaks down at some point and wars start over getting something from the cake.
Same shit with carbon emissions, now fishing and soon water.
Absolutely. This could be fixed with the teachings from the 'Prisoners dilemma'.
I am starting to think that there are big decisions, that have a worldwide impact, that cannot be left just to the local government of turn.
Take for example Bolsonaro's approach to the Amazon. Those are decisions that impact the whole world, possibly for generations to come. We cannot allow a local government to do what they want just because they happen to have this piece of land in their own country. We need a global system to enforce measures to protect the planet.
Is this the role of the UN, EU, etc.? In Brazil's specific case, concerted sanctions were proposed to convince Brazil to behave a certain way [0]. If this doesn't work, maybe the carrot is better than the stick. I know this case is a little unique because the Brazillian government appears to be acting against the will of its people with regards to conserving the rainforest.
Economists have many choices when their models break: they can go poetic "tragedy of the commons", technical "externalities", John Nash "prisoner's dilemma", or even sort of nonsensical "internalizing externalities".
Nope. Tragedy of commons means that everybody share a legit right over resources but management fails. This is invasion, burn and plunder by a third part (one that does not necessarily has a legit right over the resource) while the commons are sleeping.
I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons." Rather, I've always seen it used to describe a situation where everyone would benefit if everyone took one action, but individually the incentive structure is to do the opposite -- effectively you're able to get the things you want for minimal personal cost and with large external costs.
It very explicitly applies to shared resources like fisheries, and it crops up in much more mundane scenarios too. E.g., when water costs are split between multiple apartments you can pay peanuts for nearly unrestricted personal water use by offloading most of the costs to everyone else.
> I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons."
Is a simplification, but the idea that I wanted to stress is that everybody in a "tragedy of the commons" case has some kind of legal rights to exploit the shared resource.
Pirate fishing doesn't has rights over the resource. Is an illegal activity, parallel to the legal quotes, that boycotts any measures taken for a sustainable management.
And not property rights the way water rights sometimes works, where a group of people all have the right to take all they can.
If the same people owned an aquifer but all had to pay for what they used, the water would be more properly priced.
With water, as with fish, people often pay the cost of taking the resource and not a price that reflects the value of the resource.
The value is actually more like the future cost of replacing the resource. Once your aquifer is empty, you must ship water in. Or desalinate. That's more like the real cost.
With a species of fish, the replacement is incalculable. But one thing is clear. The price should increase rapidly as it becomes scarcer, preserving the incentive to keep the population viable.
That can't happen if people just pay the cost of going out there and getting the fish. The price has to reflect the value of the fish too.
If the right too harvest a population were a piece of property that could be bought and sold, the incentive to preserve the population would be stronger.
You might even see technologies that avoid taken pregnant females and that count how many males there are so you have enough of those too.
This is almost word for word the economic advice given by Larry Summers to Russia when Yeltsin (an American puppet) was figuring out what to do with Russian industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He told them to put it in private hands. He told them it didn't really matter whose hands it ended up in. He told them that provided it was in private hands with property rights well respected then the economy would thrive throughout the 90s.
It ultimately ended up mostly in the hands of the oligarchs or abandoned while the rest of Russia starved. A lot of it got clawed back in the early 2000s and has been better managed since.
companies, with full ownership of the land, are ruining the topsoil of their land because the cost of farming sustainably is greater than the cost of acquiring new land
Property rights don't work that way, unfortunately we can't price everything correctly because too many special interests are out there and people are easily fooled.
This. It’s a shame a magazine called “Economist” eschews the simple answer any economist would provide and instead advocates a complicated regulatory scheme like this.
The article explains why bans may be preferable to market-based solutions in this case. The gist is that it's easier to enforce a ban ("nobody is allowed to fish here until 2022! get out!") than any kind of pricing mechanism ("let's see, yesterday a random Chinese trawler came in and picked up, I guess, 4 tons of mackerel, so add that to the week's total and..."), and many of the relevant countries with depleted fisheries may not even have the regulatory capacity for the latter.
The problem with that simple answer, is that fish move. If you don't catch them on your patch, you don't get to reap the benefits next year - the person with the patch north of yours gets to catch them next month.
This is kind of like saying that, because farmers must occasionally let their field lie fallow, government must ban farming in some areas. Fish migratory patterns would naturally be priced into the fishing rights market.
No, it's not. If a farmer leaves a field fallow they will benefit from it later because the field does not move. If you do not fish an area you will not benefit from it later because the fish do move.
This is not a hypothetical; it's the reality fishermen have been dealing with for decades.
There's a story.
An isolated native from a South American jungle met a researcher and was taken to the city for the first time. He saw a traffic policeman on the street and asked who is that, why is he dressed like that, why are people following his direction etc.
When explained, he thought immediately the idea sounded great. In their tribe, they got locked into spirals of revenge. He said he wished they could have police in the jungle as well.
Many societies have decided to respect some common rules. Sometimes it means that someone as a person can't quite do what they would like to do. That is the price.
The societies not being able to organize well were overrun by others, more organized ones. Sometimes the rules were changed.
It's worth noting that fish aren't distributed evenly across the ocean. Most aquatic life exists on or near the continental shelves, which typically lie within someones EEZ.
For anyone even mildly interested in crime, exploitation, vigilantes and other human stories across the oceans, check out The Outlaw Ocean by NYT journalist Ian Urbina. Brilliant work.
I'm in the middle of it right now! In addition to some amazing first-person narrative about life at sea, it does answer a lot of the "why don't they just" questions in this thread. However he doesn't offer a solution to the fundamental tragedy of the commons problem. As with many other global problems, there seems no way to solve this without global government co-ordination, which seems pretty unlikely.
We need to implement Pigovian taxes that is related to the number of fish. Ie taking up fish is not free it’s related to the amount of fish in the ocean. If the fish is endangered the price of fishing increases exponentially for that species.
The problem isn't so much coming up with a specific mechanism to limit fishing. Such a tax would work, as would outright quotas backed by criminal law.
It's to agree and to implement any common strategy in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, where it's beneficial for every single participant to break any agreement. Another difficulty is that the partners that would agree (governments) are not themselves fishing. Even with the best intentions, not all of them have the means to sufficiently police every operator of a fishing vessel.
The silver lining is that it's an "iterative Prisoner's Dilemma". The "prisoner"'s decision isn't isolated from everything, because others will respond in the next round. The issue can also be combined with others, tying, for example, trade agreements to sufficient cooperation (c.f. Brexit).
But the sheer number of participants alone makes it a slow slog. Just look at the problems OPEC has, even though that group is a lot smaller and the activity in question is far easier to control.
Interesting comment. In single shot prisoners dilemma the best strategy for both players are too cooperate remain silent. In iterative prisoners dilemma the best strategy are Tit for tat strategy.
The strategy should be nice not defect before opponent, Retaliating, forging and non envious. How do you make a tit for tat fishing strategy?
No, in single-shot PD betrayal is the dominant strategy, as your link shows. It's better if your opponent also betrays, and its better if they stay silent (the whistleblower scenario). See that wikipedia link if in doubt.
You could also set a fish quota, and let people buy and sell their quota. Then the market sets the price, the government just has to decide how much fish is sustainable to take each year. Ontario has a similar system for emissions.
Of course with fishing it all falls apart if there are multiple countries fishing in the same area without having a unified system.
The sad part is that is most likely how it would go down, in Florida we see the continual regulations on the recreational fisherman, why commercial allotments do not suffer an equal measure in reduction of catch allowance for that particular species.
This is slowly starting to change as recreational sports fishing organizations have become more powerful in their lobbying efforts to share the burden across both commercial and recreational, but it is still fairly uneven handed with recreational bearing the brunt of restrictions, closures and taxation.
Its an incredible statistic that fish is consumed more than cows, pigs, or beef. I don’t think I’ve been anywhere this is close to true. Where I am I think farmed salmon is at least 5x the price of chicken. Some countries must be hugely affecting the statistics. I wonder if there are poorer countries where people rarely eat meat but fish for subsistence?
I live in Vietnam and I can believe it. Here's a map of the world showing where people eat fish. It is basically a list of places where Americans are unlikely to go.
Asia accounts for 71% of world fish consumption. In places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia fish makes up over 50% of all animal protein consumed.
Unless you've travelled widely in Asia, especially outside of the rich up & coming cities with restaurants catering to foreign tourist palates and ate in local places, it would make sense that you haven't seen it.
Thats an interesting map, I did not realize that fish was such a big source of protein in those countries, although even at 10gr/day its not a huge component of the diet so overall animal protein must be low.
When I lived in Spain I could get a Tuna steak as long as my forearm from the local pescadería for €2. In the UK that would have cost me €15-20. However I live on the "Tuna Coast" at the time and was obviosly abundant.
> Stopping some fishing would increase overall catches
Stop fishing altogether and increase --otherwise dying-- marine life.
Having particular ecosystems in the ocean is not something we can afford to miss. And the current state of over-fishing is the main reason several of them are almost out of existence.
Sadly farm fishing as it stands now relies on the bulk catch of wild fishing. Farm fishing is a machine to turn unsalable tralled fish into commercially desirable delicious fish. Fish farming cannot yet exist without wild trawling.
It is something which is worked on, on several fronts. Replacing fish meal and oil with insects, mussels, vegetable based products, etc. There is less fish meal and oil than a few years ago in fish feed. Here is one example of the work. My company also just got a government grant to work on this.
Well, let's stop consuming fish, because maritime ecosystems, stop meat because animal cruelty and global warming, stop soy because rainforests and genetic manipulation, stop rice because methane emissions, stop potatoes because neophytes in most of the world and stop lettuce because low-calorie waste of precious land.
I guess that leaves us with wheat and soylent green...
Answers like yours are just cherry-picking some approaches to support your favourite solution, veganism. There are many more of those kinds of problems, stemming from a common one, overpopulation. Any linear approach reducing consumption of something glosses over the fact that world population is still in exponential growth, and factors influencing that are barely understood and at best handwaving arguments about expected slowdowns are provided. Veganism is throwing a hotdog at a herd of hungry lions here...
the world is not in exponential population growth - the rate of growth has been shrinking for two generations. global population decline will happen in my lifetime. the demographic transition happened centuries ago in some countries. fertility rates are falling faster than any of the overpopulation monster-in-the-closet analyses assume, why are you afraid of overpopulation?
They are equally important in broad terms, but the ecosystems under the sea are less noticed than the ones one land and less relevant in the minds of the majority.
This seems like the same problem with traffic. If fewer people drove we'd have better throughput in our roadways, when the roadways get more efficient more people want to drive, and we have clogged roadways again.
As with illegal french and Spanish ships in British waters I believe the best approach is to sink the illegal vessels if they do not cease activity and leave given fair warning.
The Chinese have flotillas of hundreds of illegal fishing boats that travel across the globe to devastate local fish populations. They recently illegally entered the area surrounding the Galapagos to terrible effect.[1] So as sensible as this concept is, it needs enforcement, and at this point I’m not sure what, shy of direct violence, will get this to stop.
Fish are a resource to be colonized at gunpoint like anything else. It's just that this (fortunately) produced a set of ludicrous little skirmishes rather than the Royal Navy turning up and shelling Reykjavík.
Oh, no, absolutely; it is just quite surprising to me that these were relatively modern events. (It’s also a fun case study where negotiations failed spectacularly, with interesting/unexpectedly underlying causes.)
Except absolutely nothing in the world would be lost, in reality, no aspect of human existence, no reduction of joy, if people fished less and fish was more expensive, or whatever crap, in retrospect, people were collecting into their bellies or as stupid fashion for history.
The whole focus on Chinese fishing in foreign EEZs is a red herring (excuse the pun) compared to the real goal behind subsidizing a large deep water fishing fleet.
Most Chinese fishing takes place right outside the EEZ in the high seas, and after the 2017 fiasco with a Chinese ship caught in the Galapagos EEZ they've been very careful not to actually enter its 200nm limit. The linked article has some great maps of AIS data that clearly show this. There may still be scattered instances of ships with AIS transponders turned off being sent into the EEZ or transfers from non-Chinese flagged vessels to Chinese ships, but according to the article "In most cases, what is detectable may not be illegal, and care is clearly being taken by the Chinese fleet to give the appearance of legal compliance with national and international laws."
The real bombshell is this here: "A task force report published in 2010 by Chinese government, industry, and academics argued that countries that have a longer history of using the ocean have more power in determining how resources are distributed and thus receive a larger share of those resources: occupying brings about rights and interests"
China is subsidizing a large deep water fleet so they become the largest fishers on the high seas outside of the 200nm EEZs and so can write the future rules for high seas fishing. As stated in the article, of the regional fishery management organizations that operate in the area very few Chinese ships are registered with the IATTC (founded 1949) despite China being a member. Rather, the ships are all registered with the SPRFMO (founded 2012). It's a lot easier to write organization rules when you're a founding member than when you join decades later. In international politics possession (in this case precedence) is 9/10ths of the law and you can be sure in any future negotiations over fishing quotas in the currently loosely regulated high seas China will have the largest voice because they have the largest fleet and largest historical catch.
While everyone's still back in the 80s guarding their 200nm UNCLOS EEZs China's already got the first mover advantage on everything outside those EEZs.
If countries want to preserve their fishing stocks for local fishermen they'll have to set fishing quotas or no fish zones within their EEZs like the article suggests. But fish have no conception of EEZ boundaries and the moment they wander outside they're free game for Chinese DWF fleets. From China's view, if foreign countries want big EEZs, they can shoulder the cost of maintaining the fishing grounds inside.
Looks like the real solution is to genetically modify fish so they always stay within 200 nm of land.
Humans alive today don't have much worse lives because of our killing of the Mammoth, the dodo, or the giant sloth.
Humans alive in 2000 years also won't have much worse lives. It'll be a sidenote in biology class "Did you know, there used to be many different types of animal roaming freely, but now there are just two types left, cats and dogs.".
Humans who don't have something don't know how great it was or what they're missing.
Perhaps your ancestors could have told you how awesome it was to ride mammoths into the sunset... But those ancestors are no longer around and we think of them as mostly theoretical creatures.
as someone who aspires to be deeply knowledgeable in many random areas -- you mind me asking how you came to know so much about this Chinese deep water fleet?
Sadly, the guy who wanted to “get tough on China” was an idiot, which may set back that policy agenda by 20 years. Wish we had an actual tough guy President like Putin to wage the inevitable total war against China.
Why has everyone forgotten that China has nuclear ballistic missiles? Total war against China would involve the destruction of most major cities on both sides.
What is need is anti-fishing equipment mines, that destroy nets brought into a protected area. A solar powered drone-sub with a "gnaw"-wire-saw near the towing cables should do.
Fishing is a dying "industry" as is old school electricity- every time fishing goes into decline, fish-farms grow.
Interesting Trivia by the way: Fish farming is one of the cheapest ways to generate protein besides insects. Fish living in a weightless environ and requiring very little body heat, help to that.
This may be a dopey question, but my understanding was that gun ownership basically didn't exist in China. The one instance of going shooting in China of which I've heard involved going to a special range in a major city in which rifles were chained to the table at the firing line. How do boats get away with this?
Sometimes countries have a problem with something used domestically, but zero issue when the same is done exclusively for export.
> China permits the sale of hemp seeds and hemp oil and the use of CBD in cosmetics, but it has not yet approved cannabidiol for use in food and medicines. So, for now, the bulk of Hempsoul’s product — roughly two tons a year — is bound for markets overseas.
Chinese fishing boats that are illegally harvesting in other countries' maritime regions spend a great deal of time outside Chinese territory, where Chinese law is not enforced.
And that's ignoring the possibility of collaborating with the Chinese state.
Not that this is happening, but I don't see any large barriers to it.
If they're fishing in the Gulf of California, they might be able to get guns from some Mexican cartel, but they'd better not try to get them back to China.
Though I'm not sure whether that's really happening, since a search for "chinese fishing boats fired" https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+fishing+boats+fired exclusively returns results where coast guards of other nations fired at Chinese boats. If Chinese boats had guns, you'd think they'd use them and we'd get to hear about it.
Why is actual violence not a solution? How many fishing ships would need to be sunk by the Chilean Navy before they wouldn't enter their territorial waters?
They would not sink boats. Even for some of the largest fishing boats, the marine would just sent a larger military boat and board it, transport the sailors to land and give them to the police for dealing with. The fishing boat would be confiscated.
Actually sinking of boats is highly unnecessary and not something people do unless the other boat has cannons and rockets, which a fishing boat is unlikely to have.
> unless the other boat has cannons and rockets, which a fishing boat is unlikely to have.
Well, you say that, but they have been known to use bombs.
> Sea Shepherd said fishermen threw rocks that broke the ship’s windows and tossed gasoline bombs that briefly ignited a fire on the Farley Mowat’s deck. [0]
Is not the Chinese navy in the sense of Chinese government. Is Chinese mafia or Chinese big private company or Multinational Big company. For each one you close there will be more to come as long that is profitable. The Chinese (or Japanese or whatever) government will protest and try to retaliate of course
But is not necessarily government. Is "wery well known japanese car maker" storing frozen tuna for speculating with the market prices in a sort of "gold" substitute, but more profitable than gold market. Yes this has happened and is probably happening now. We know it because the 2011 Tsunami destroyed the hidden storages. Japan, Not China (in this case).
Is Totoaba prices in the Chinese market being falsely promoted as miraculous remedy for all stuff and prices manipulated to the point of making small fortunes, where the pirate local fishermen are paid in peanuts. You wipe the pirate locals has the same result as wiping the small drug dealers.
And in the other part of the warfield, we have a bunch of environmentalists without any real money. People that can be overpowered, crushed by lawyers or assasinated selectively. What will be more convenient.
Neither Ukraine nor Chile are NATO members. In fact the invasion was triggered due to membership being on the table -- I am going to avoid touching this subject further though here.
A simpler method would be satellite observation[1] coupled with a universal "you catch it, you land it" rule - no more throwing by-catch back into the sea.
All State authority is backed by violence. If you wish to enforce an international decree, be prepared to use violence when an entity decides they are above the law at the expense of the planet or greater society.
If S.H.I.E.L.D. waltzes into Wakanda and steals a ton of vibranium from their mines, is that not an act of theft/violence? Or is plundering another nation's resources not considered violence?
Well actually, violence is not just physical in nature.
You can be fiscally violent, i.e. harsh sanctions/trade wars, you can be emotionally violent, why you can commit unspeakable acts of violence without ever striking another person.
Theft of resources to a point of detriment is always violence.
Stealing an apple from Farmer John so you can eat is not violence.
Destroying the ecosystem which Farmer John uses to grow his apples, so that you can have more apples, is violence.
Overfishing in or near territories to the point of resource scarcity is 100%, always violence.
How do you plan to get others to go along with your interesting definition of violence? It sounds very much like something coming from fanatical "meat is murder" folks - at which point, it becomes hard to place trust in what the person is saying because one begins to doubt his/her motives.
I like how this works. Just make claims and they become true.
There are other words to describe different concepts. If you want to conflate disparate things, I still don't see how you intend to have others go along with you. I'll wait till I hear news of a violent offender where the accusation was of consuming too much of a resource.
I still stand by the analogy I used. This is no different than taking a word that people associate with something negative and expanding its use to refer to something else. I did not intend to "tease" your royal highness.
I'm afraid we are in disagreement again. I'm merely challenging your definition which naturally preceded my challenge as I do not yet possess unusual foresight.
Nothing more than you substantiating your claim. If it is indeed as you say, then the honourable thing for me to do would be to concede that my confidence was misplaced.
As a result of violence being such a complex phenomenon, there is no clear definition for it. Therefore, it is often understood differently by different people in different contexts - such as those from different countries, cultures, or belief systems.
While no standard definition of violence has been established, it is important, when developing effective prevention strategies, to have a clear understanding of violence and the context in which it occurs. In its 2002 World Report on Violence and Health, the World Health Organisation (WHO) proposes a definition of violence that has since become a working term for many international and South African organisations working in the field:
WHO definition of violence
“The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.”
---
Psychological violence (also referred to as emotional or mental abuse) includes verbal and non-verbal communication used with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally, or to exert control over another person.
The impact of psychological violence can be just as significant as that of other, more physical forms of violence, as the perpetrator subjects the victim to behaviour which may result in some form of psychological trauma, such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. This includes, but is not limited to:
* expressive aggression (e.g., humiliating and degrading),
* coercive control (e.g., limiting access to things or people, and excessive monitoring of a person’s whereabouts or communications),
* threats of physical or sexual violence,
* control of reproductive or sexual health,
* and exploitation of a person’s vulnerability (e.g., immigration status or disability).
This not only leads to mental health problems, but also to severe physical problems, such as psychosomatic disorders.
---
There, I have done your research into a pre-established, publicly accepted fact which I have no obligation to do (or else I would be doing it all day!). Your welcome.
Now it's your turn to come up with reasons why this evidence of historic colloquial use will not be enough for you.
I'm afraid I am still unable to see where you have been able to make the connection in a satisfactory manner. I do concede that you have found something which says the definition is not the same for everyone. Otherwise the definition you listed in quotes is about intentional use of force. The other definition is specifically called "psychological violence" in the part you quoted. There too, I have on complaint and no disagreement. That, however, is not the same as "violence". To be able to communicate the concept you had in mind, without conflating the two, that part you quoted specifically adds the qualifier "psychological". With that qualifier, I think it's just easier to communicate and we probably wouldn't even be having this long exchange.
I used a qualifier: emotional violence. I felt like I didn't need to be redundant and use the word "psychological" as well. You are shifting goal posts and clinging to quite a small island at this point, and it's kind of sad, so I am done with this conversation.
Too expensive. Somali pirates were stopped by a private military company on their ground, not waters. Navy of several countries just couldn't keep with pirates.
Australia are great at this. They manoeuvre their armoured and armed navy vessels between Japanese whalers and whales, then say "sure, go ahead and shoot your little harpoon, see what will happen".
They do this endlessly until the Japanese give up and go home.
They do this in International waters around Australia, and it's a huge point of pride among Australians.
Fun fact: Australia ceased their own whaling only in 1978, and that was because killing off some 98% of the whales in their own waters made it uneconomical.
This is where privateering comes in... these issues existed in the past and are hard to solve. Privateers gave the state the ability to look the other way.
You might make treaties with larger nations who could use various other negotiation methods (or, failing that, navies) to try and reach a global balance.
Why would a "larger nation" such as China agree to such a treaty when they can blow you out of their waters, and you can't blow them out of yours? What's in it for them? It's not in their interest, so a treaty is a non-starter.
A big nation doesn't give a shit about a small nation unless there's something in it for them. I.e. if they're a part of some pre-existing union, or if they host their military bases, or something else. And there's zero chance a big nation will risk going to war to protect a small nation's fishing rights, unless a war was already in the cards (in which case it might be used as a rather desperate "casus belli").
maybe just destroy their fishing equipment, there will be aftermath but I can't imagine the narrative "Ecuador's military going all over to the China sea to bully civilians" makes sense to anyone.
As someone pointed out above you can board them. I suppose an argument could be made for sinking them; it would prevent reclamation of the vessel for fishing later.
You bring up a good point, they could consume all the fish. But if we can't regulate them, WE will consume all the fish. We don't need to consume all the fish.
We need to stop doing business with China period. They're going to leapfrog our knowledge industries, leading to total economic stagnation of the West.
We shouldn't do business with a country that steals, doesn't play fair, is the embodiment of 1984, and above all, commits genocide.
Get the G7 countries, Korea, India, etc. on board with the plan. Start doing manufacturing in India, Vietnam, Africa, and Mexico. Copy their Belt initiative, but make the countries that do business with us allies rather than devastatingly indebted.
Agree in unison to cancel Chinese debts owed as repayment for technologies stolen.
Defend the South China Sea for energy exploration by other neighboring countries. Defend Vietnam's water rights.
Strengthen alliance with Vietnam, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In the extreme case, offer recognition of independence to Taiwan or even US statehood.
Brain drain China. Offer immigration packages and economic incentives to Chinese PhD students.
We have to be proactive about the situation. Xi has played the CCP's hand early, and we have a chance to nip their ambitions in the bud.
Before anyone accuses me of racism, I care deeply about the Chinese people. I also acknowledge the problems of the West - racial injustice, inequality, ongoing wars. But compared to democracy, as flawed as it is, I think the future posed by Communist China is nightmare fuel and has the potential to eclipse the future we are trying to build.
For decades, American businesses and consumers have been happy to let the Chinese government get away with anything so long as our plastic widgets could be made - and bought - for 5 cents less. But the Chinese government is an incredibly malevolent actor by any measure, and the rest of the world needs to rethink its willingness to be complicit in their actions by way of economic cooperation.
This is comically naive in the light of recent events. Trade wars will be over by the end of 2021, and _all_ of the US manufacturing capacity will move there now, unimpeded. The only thing that's stopping that now and forcing US companies to diversify are trade tensions.
The US does not have concentration camps full of religious minorities. The US media is only lightly censored, as opposed to the fully censored Chinese media. The US has not implemented a social credit system to turn its own population into a secret police. The US doesn't cover up global pandemics and then "disappear" anyone who talks about the cover up. The US is not the worlds biggest jailer of journalists. The US is not a one-party system which has outlawed protests etc. The US does not execute mass-scale non-consensual organ-harvesting of religious minorities to fuel their organ tourism industry. You should be thankful that speaking against the US government won't get you kidnapped and tortured like it would in China. If this was China, your very comment could lead to your death.
> The US has not implemented a social credit system to turn its own population into a secret police.
The US does seem to have a large misunderstanding of what the social credit system is, and the ways it differs, and does not differ from the regular credit system.
In what ways is the social credit system not a "tool for comprehensive government surveillance and for suppression of dissent from the Communist Party of China", as Wikipedia puts it?
How does this compare to something like this super trawler? [1]. I feel like this comment is just circling out what "The Chinese" are doing and neglecting the fact that Europeans are doing similar destructive things.
It’s way more than hundreds. China has has hundreds illegally off of just Galapagos, and laughably claimed they were all operating legally. This article on that incident says China has 17000 “distant fishing” boats. Maybe not all are in economic exclusive zones but I bet most operate in ways that would be illegal under US law: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/260-chinese-b...
All avenues that aren’t violent have not worked and the UN or the international court system are too slow to respond effectively. YouTube already has many videos of military ships shooting at Chinese fishing vessels. That seems like the most expedient solution.
Note that bunker fuel is likely to be a bit more environmentally friendly from a long-term climate change point of view, as being less refined, less energy is used in processing it.
The pollutants from it aren't a concern when far out at sea, as they're only a threat to local air quality. They're just a concern closer to shores.
What I’m getting at is that these distant voyages are only economically possible at a certain fuel cost. If the fuel cost goes too high, these distance voyages are no longer feasible.
They most likely use diesel fuel, given that most are probably relatively smaller vessels. But some ships are “factory ships”, with onboard processing, and those would likely be large enough to hold engines that can take bunker fuel.
Really is time to do something about the Chinese emptying the oceans. We need some subs around the Galapagos to help them and sink those Chinese vessels if needed.
Basically all of these articles tries to spin Chinese distance fishing fleets operating largely in international waters, at the edge of respective country EEZs, legally as... illegal. This article specifically:
>nothing blatantly illegal to report to the Ecuadorian navy, the Coast Guard was relegated to watching,
There is nothing to stop enforcement of isolated illegal behaviour, which actual analysis of transponder behaviour shows, is limited to handful of boats and such behaviour is consistent among other distant fishing fleet. CCP doesn't give a shit when other countries enforce on Chinese distant fishing vessels unless behavior overlaps with disputed maritime areas. Plenty of Chinese ships detained or even sunk by foreign coast guards, central government just shrugs and say tough shit. Though it's a sufficiently annoying diplomatic issue that China is trying to reduce it's DWF size in the next few years.
> devastate local fish populations
At the end of the day, China _UNDER_ fishes per capita, including the Galapagos drama. Ecuador & Peru, two countries with 1/28th population of China, captures about about 1/4 of China, who also has 1/2 the EEZ of these countries, which incidentally means China has to fish more in international waters. In fact Ecuador & Peru catches as much fish annually as US with 1/10 the population... so if anything these two countries need to fish less and China needs to fish more.
BTW top 5 DWF fleets by size: China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Spain. Adjusted per capita China would rank behind Taiwan, Korea. In terms of transshipped fishing (offloading catch to support vessels) which allows fishing fleets to fish longer with less traceability, China ranks behind South Korea, Japan, Taiwan.
> The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator.
>IN 2018, THE most recent year for which relevant data are available, people consumed more fish than they did either pork or beef or poultry.
The lede isn't buried, it's right there, but it goes unremarked. We already converted land mammals to human food:
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
> If we're pulling out more fish from the sea than all those pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, etc., that's gonna leave a mark, eh?
The sea is big, though. 3x as large as the land, and it's mostly teeming with life. It gets just as much solar energy per square km as the land, so it can support a roughly similarly dense ecosystem.
The problem is more about what type of fish we like to eat than the sheer volume: if we were willing to make do with krill and plankton we could sustainably consume many times our current intake, but not so when we want cod and tuna.
It’s nutrients not sunlight that’s the ocean’s limitation. Much like comparing forests and deserts the ocean is a wildly different place based on local conditions.
Fishing is not amenable to enclosure. Unfortunately that's how our society has managed resources in the field for the last 500 years. Worse, the ocean laughs at Westphalian borderisms. It's not only our economic traditions: our political institutions are not up to the task. Stalinism relies on borders too.
We have some arrogance about our recent social achievements, as a species. In a few centuries we went from clashing empires to a semblance of cooperative and democratic internationalism with a general if superficial repudiation of racism and imperialism. Some people, both pro- and anti-capitalist, have suggested that we are within sight of a long-term equilibrium of social development. It's humbling in these circumstances to remember that we still don't even really know what to do about... fish.
Well we also don't know what to do about suicide. Just because unsolved problems exist, doesn't mean civilization hasn't improved a lot. You would surely never expect to get to a state with no remaining social problems.
Except all that is bull. Look at Iceland and the Cod Wars. Massive areas of the ocean can be pulled into the direct control of nations and it would have an enormous impact on the oceans.
The Chinese straight-up don't care about legal claims (see: the galapagos islands fishing incidents), unless you are willing to use force and sink offending vessels they don't really care what you think or say about it.
NATO is indeed quite powerful. Unfortunately the strategic balance of power in the Atlantic cannot be held hostage by most nations trying to protect their fishing rights!
It went even as far as stopping all fishing of herring in 1977-1982. That worked (in the sense of “herring didn’t go extinct, so there still is something to catch”)
The EU probably has the worst system in the world, at least by total impact.
> "every year, the European Commission makes recommendations on the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to the Council of Ministers based on scientific evidence. The Council of Ministers, however, often disregards these recommendations because, as a rule, the priority for these ministers seems to protect jobs in the short term, not to maintain sustainability. As a consequence, the annual catch agreed to by the Council of Ministers is generally around 48 per cent more than the scientists’ recommended figure. The fact that 88 per cent of European fish stocks, measured against maximum sustainable yield (MSY), are overexploited is due in part to these excessively high catch quotas."
AFAIK herring is now at very healthy levels again in the North Sea, right? I was under the impression that it's one of the few "good" fish you could still eat nowadays, or should I adjust those dietary habits again?
I’m not an expert, but I think it’s more or less sustainable, but not at the levels just before the moratorium (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274558008_Recruitme...), and a lot lower than historical levels (can’t find a simple reference, but there’s data that on that. Found https://edepot.wur.nl/317580, which isn’t that clear and certainly not succinct)
New Zealand has fisheries management with a lot of quota provided to Maori Iwi (tribes) who in turn might sell the quota or run a fishing business outright or in partnership. Additionally Maori have customary fishing rights for funerals and other customary events.
I am not quite sure what you mean by property rights and what it means in reference to other places.
On a side note, New Zealand just changed a number of significant fishing rules for commercial and recreational fisherman. The new restrictions on types of fishing that are allowed are to help protect both the Hectors dolphin (est. 10,000 left) and the Maui dolphin (est. 50 left.
It is good to see these unilateral efforts are possible in NZ due to their being no competing interests who have legal entitlement to the same waters.
Annecdotally, It is still relatively easy to go to the beach in NZ and catch a few fish of 2 - 6kg in size.
> I am not quite sure what you mean by property rights
The "property" is the quota, the proportion of the total allowed catch of a species. As you say quotas can be bought and sold, so they are ordinary property.
(The total catch is set annually, sometimes even based on the recommendations of fisheries experts.)
Have you seen Elinor Ostrom's work[1]? She gives the conditions under which commons resource sharing works. Globalized fishing doesn't meet them. I believe she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prizein economics too.
It turns it into a self regulated market. For example one of the principles is that the self regulation of the participants must be recognised as autonomous by higher authorities.
The basic principle is that it makes the long term health and viability of the resource in the interests of those exploiting it, by putting the ability to effectively manage the resource long term in their hands.
As David Attenborough stated in his most recent documentary, the solution for healthy oceans and enough fishing for all is to protect 1/3 of the ocean and coasts with marine reserves. This model has proven to work in many places, now it just needs to be implemented worldwide by unanimous consensus. And enforced by a properly funded Sea Shepherd armada perhaps.
I mean it's real for taxation too, it's just nobody wants to ever accept they might be on the side of the Laffer curve that implies taxes should go up.
I think your pessimism on the ability to find causation in econometrics is unfounded. There is good evidence we are on the left side of the laffer curve, although I’m on my phone right now.
No, presumably most people here realize they want to read more than what ad-farms can push out.
You should learn how to bypass paywalls so that you aren't stuck in that boat. It's a necessary skill for the modern world alongside using bittorrent and youtube-dl.
Same shit with carbon emissions, now fishing and soon water.