The Privatization of the Oceans.

• Author: Leal, Donald R.
• Position: Book review

The Privatization of the Oceans By Rognvaldur Hannesson Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. 202. $35.00 cloth, $20.00 paperback.

Rognvaldur Hannesson's Privatization of the Oceans is a fascinating story of the development of property rights in ocean fisheries. Hannesson, a fishery economist, is to be commended for backing up his story with solid research and thoughtful insights into the challenges facing both the fishing industry and national governments in this ongoing development.

Hannesson sets the tone with an interesting comparison between the development of property rights in ocean fisheries and the enclosures and clearances of common land in England and Scotland centuries earlier. He finds notable similarities, including bitter battles over the initial allocation of property rights and the impossibility of accommodating everyone in the process (p. 23). He revisits this theme later in the book when he examines why some countries have adopted property rights in their fisheries more readily than others.

Next, Hannesson explains why the transition to property rights in commercial fishing is a relatively recent phenomenon, even though ocean fishing has been carried out for centuries. Prior to the 1900s, he writes, "[f]ishing technology was for the most part so primitive that the effect of fishing was of limited consequence; the abundance of fish was influenced more by environmental factors than by human activity" (p. 24). But fishing changed dramatically after the end of World War II. Technological improvements such as sonar to pinpoint the location of large aggregations offish and powerful vessels to track them down to the ends of the earth rendered fish stocks extremely vulnerable to hook and net.

Fishing's new lethality, coupled with the common-property nature of the resource, made it prone to what Garret Hardin famously called "the tragedy of the commons" (Science 162 [December 13, 1968]: 1243-48). Hannesson writes, "Fish accessible to anyone will be captured as quickly as possible by those who first discover them, for otherwise they will be taken by someone else" (p. 1). Moreover, "without rights securing for individuals the fruits of their restraint, no one will have an incentive to leave anything behind" (p. 2).

One might add that with ocean fish stocks being a common-property resource and with few controls on access, there is a tendency for too many fishermen to enter the fishery and for too many fish to be taken, as each...