It is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
Yeah, the only real solution is to eliminate commons.
In case of the ocean I would say that every country should have the economic right to all points in the ocean closer to them than to any other country. Everyone else gets free passage (subject to your reasonable environmental laws) and to engage in scientific operations, but only the country has any right to remove anything beyond scientific samples.
It's not perfect given that some species move about, but it would go a long ways towards controlling the problem.
What you’re describing is different from what the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is doing. They’re essentially strip mining the ocean thousands of miles away from China, leaving the locals to deal with the ecological damage and resulting consequences.
Different and the same. What's the same is that it is a shared resource that people benefit privately from and there is no authority that can manage it globally. Like I say, those fish the Chinese caught are real, people are not sure what the long term consequences are.
Sink boats until the behavior changes. Behavior won't change until a sufficient number of boats sink. Decades of talking and explaining and diplomacy and politics have failed. The only two options remaining are accepting the status quo or sinking boats. Anything else is performative.
I dunno, drones and missiles are probably the most cost effective way. I was in favor of diplomacy 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, but I'm completely and totally done pretending diplomacy and education and hearts and minds type campaigns have any value, anymore.
I also think it's worth going to war over. The threat of killing the oceans is a pretty drastic and permanent threat to the entire world, and it can cascade into apocalyptic conditions.
Having a coherent frame of rules that allow conservation actually increases the fish yield, but China's treating it like a zero sum game. It's gotta be stopped, since they're entirely and brazenly unwilling to stop. The same drones used against the venezuelan drug boats could be targeted at the exploitative fishing boats, and a consistent year or two could force international agreements and some sort of collaborative enforcement. Drone platforms and satellite monitoring could even make it mostly autonomous.
This is so delusional and siloed from current geopolitical realities. This will lead to war and/or sanctions by China on multiple exports and imports with the offending countries.
