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The last industry that I shall discuss is the seafood industry (marine fisheries), which faces the same fundamental problem as do the oil, mining, and timber industries: rising world population and affluence leading to increasing demand for decreasing supplies. While seafood consumption is high and rising in the First World, it is even higher and rising faster elsewhere, e.g., having doubled in China within the last decade. Fish now account for 40% of all protein (of both plant and animal origin) consumed in the Third World and are the main animal protein source for over a billion Asians. Worldwide population shifts from the interior towards the coast within countries will increase the demand for seafood, because three-quarters of the world’s population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by the year 2010. As a result of our dependence on seafood, the sea provides jobs and income for 200,000,000 people around the world, and fishing is the most important basis of the economies of Iceland, Chile, and some other countries.

While any renewable biological resource poses difficult management problems, marine fisheries are especially hard to manage. Even fisheries confined to waters controlled by a single nation pose difficulties, but fisheries extending over water controlled by multiple nations pose greater problems and have tended to be the earliest to collapse, because no single nation can impose its will. Fisheries in the open ocean outside the 200-mile marine limit lie beyond the control of any national government. Studies suggest that, with proper management, the world’s seafood catch could be sustained at a level even higher than its present level. Sadly, though, the majority of the world’s commercially important marine fisheries have already either collapsed to the point of being commercially extinct, have been severely depleted, are currently overfished or fished to the limit, are recovering only slowly from past overfishing, or are otherwise in urgent need of management. Among the most important fisheries that have already collapsed are Atlantic halibut, Atlantic bluefin tuna, Atlantic swordfish, North Sea herring, Grand Banks cod, Argentinian hake, and Australian Murray River cod. In overfished areas of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, peak catches were attained in the year 1989 and have declined since then. The main reasons behind all these failures are the tragedy of the commons, discussed in the preceding chapter, which makes it difficult for consumers exploiting a shared renewable resource to reach agreement despite their shared interest in doing so; the widespread lack of effective management and regulation; and so-called perverse subsidies, i.e., the economically senseless subsidies that many governments pay for political reasons to support fishing fleets that are too large in relation to their fish stocks, that lead almost inevitably to overfishing, and that yield too low profits to survive without the subsidies.

The damage caused by overfishing extends beyond the future prospects of all of us to eat seafood, and beyond the survival of the particular fish or seafood stocks that we harvest. Most seafood is captured by netting and other methods that result in our hauling in unwanted animals besides those actually sought. Those other animals, referred to as by-catch, constitute a proportion varying between one-quarter and two-thirds of the total catch. In most cases the by-catch dies and is thrown back overboard. Included in the by-catch are unwanted fish species, juveniles of the targeted fish species, seals, dolphins and whales, sharks, and sea turtles. Yet by-catch mortality is not inevitable: for example, recent changes in fishing gear and practices reduced dolphin mortality in the eastern Pacific tuna fishery by a factor of 50. There is also heavy damage to marine habitats, notably to the seabed by trawlers and to coral reefs by dynamite and cyanide fishing. Finally, overfishing damages fishermen,