This was a comment in response to noizy on Ban, ban, ban, ban… where will it end? I hadn’t really thought about this issue (although PC, controversially, discussed it last year: Protecting a predator) so I decided to expand it into a post. Privatizing marine resources is a really interesting idea, and it turns out New Zealand is actually a pioneer in this regard.

The current situation

Great white sharks are covered by recreational fishing rules - a “bag” of one shark per fisher per day - and a wholesale ban comes into force in April, required by international agreements. There will be large fines and/or prison time for violators, and the only exception will be for the shark nets around Dunedin beaches.

Here in NZ, there was a spate of shark attacks in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them involving great whites around Dunedin. Shark nets were the response, and they initially caught large numbers of sharks. Currently this is down to about 20 a year, and no great whites have been found in the nets since the 1980s. This indicates a major decline, but little is known about numbers. Anecdotally, some very large great whites have been seen recently, for example a 5-6 metre one seen around New Plymouth last year, and a 853 kilogram monster caught near Raglan. Attacks have been sporadic since about 1990 - 9 people have been injured, some losing limbs, mostly on offshore islands.

Great white sharks are occasionally caught by recreational fishermen (example, with photos) but not in significant numbers. Average bycatch by commercial fishermen is just 200 kg per year. As for commercial utilisation, until recently some charter operators in the Chatham Islands offered shark hunting or cage diving expeditions. With such few sharks caught, it is hard to see why a full ban is needed.

DIsadvantages of banning

Banning will increase the price of shark products (trophy jaws, etc), creating an unintended incentive to hunt more sharks.

It might also increase the danger of shark attacks, as victim Vaughan Hill, who lost an arm to a great white in 1996, pointed out last year. This is particularly so because, while there is an exemption for the Dunedin shark nets, there is no exemption for removing problem sharks or killing sharks responsible for attacks, as is the case in Australia.  Here is a terrifying eyewitness account of a kayaker harassed by an enormous great white.

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs)

Currently commercial fishing in NZ is covered by individual transferable quotas (ITQs). This is a good first step to real property rights for marine resources as the quotas can be bought and sold. The system recognises that a “tragedy of the commons” situation results from a lack of marine property rights, leading to overfishing.

The Quota Management System, as explained on the MFish website involves biologists calculating the Total Allowable Catch, which is then distributed as a percentage to owners of ITQs after subtracting an estimate of recreational and Maori fishing catch.

Given that there is some limited commercial potential for charter game fishing of great whites, why not give them an ITQ? It doesn’t need to be high and it would set sustainable limits on the fishery, while not encouraging a black market in trophy jaws. And recreational quotas could be sold as well, making shark fishing more accountable.

The drawback of an ITQ is the bureaucracy required to maintain the system, and the fact that decisions are often highy politicised, leading to rent-seeking, and causing scientific research about fish stocks to be obscured by lobbying for recreational and commercial fishers. But because it creates a perpetual property right out of fish stocks, it prevents overfishing - the tragedy of the commons - and is a good first step to a libertarian system of marine resource privatization.

Ownership of individual sharks

The technology exists to tag and track individual sharks. As explained above, fishermen are not the only people to make use of great white sharks: live sharks can be a tourist attraction, especially for cage-diving operators. Those sharks need to be covered by property rights too, particularly since the feeding of sharks by cage-diving operators causes them associate humans with food. If they make the sharks more dangerous, they should be liable for the consequences.

So how about giving ownership of sharks to anyone willing to tag and track them, using GPS? Such sharks could not be legally killed (unless responsible for an unprovoked attack). Libaility for the consequences of feeding them would discourage dangerous practices, and by giving the people who use sharks a right of ownership, they would have an incentive to protect them. Far better than criminalizing fishermen. And anyone could get possession of a wild great white - marine biologists, fishermen, charter operators, even environmentalists.

Posted by Phil on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 2:19 pm.