The small-scale fishermen in Cumbria are known as haaf netters as they stand in the Solway Firth in water up to their armpits, scooping up fish with a net that hangs from a pole across their shoulders. After catching the fishe they kill them by whacking them over the head with a wooden mallet. They’ve been doing this since the Vikings were around, but lately they’ve been catching more fish than the recreational fishermen upstream would like.
But over the past years they are facing strict regulations about when they can fish, which puts them out of business. It is said that these regulations are a good example of the most common—and most inefficient—strategy for preventing commercial overfishing: making it harder to fish. Sometimes this takes the form of equipment restrictions—say, a requirement to use smaller nets. Sometimes it takes the form of a shortened fishing season. Either way, it doesn’t work.
It is said that the better strategy is to limit each fisherman to a certain amount of fish per year and not worry about how or when he goes about catching it. This is usually done by giving out tradable permits that represent a fraction of the total catch allowed each year in the fishery. In New Zealand and Iceland there is such kind of regulation for most of their fisheries with quota systems, but for some reason they haven’t caught on in the United States.
