Why does the market want tuna extinct?
When one questions why the auto makers focused on gas guzzling so-called light trucks and SUVs as opposed to fuel efficient smaller cars, the auto industry answers "it's what the market wants," as though marketing has no role in the matter.
When one questions why developers insist on building socio-economic enclaves of ugly, cheap houses (I won't call them homes) out in remote, former cornfields as opposed to building mixed use neighbourhoods where services already exist, the answer is "it's what the market wants" as though marketing has nothing to do with it.
Now it is reported that buefin tuna is an endangered species that could be wiped out within the decade. In fact, it is reported bluefin has been reduced to just 3 percent of its 1960s numbers. Ninety-seven percent of the fish has already been wiped out. And, yet, we are told demand for the fish is at an all time high.
A report in The independent tells us that a giant Japanese corporation is cornering the bluefin market and not for its protection. According to the Independent:
"Bluefin tuna frozen at -60C now could be sold in several years' time for astronomical sums if Atlantic bluefin becomes commercially extinct as forecast, a result of the near free-for-all enjoyed by the tuna fleet."
So if it is the market that drives people to commute in behemoths, to live in cheap snout houses built over corn fields, and to slobber down an endangered fish, then it must be the market that wants bluefin tuna to become extinct? Why?
Is the market a psychopath?
Of course the market is a psychopath. It has no conscience at all. That's why market-based economics can never save us from the impending economic and ecological disasters.
The idea that consumers are demanding the tar sands obscenity, the extirpation of fish stocks, the pollution of ground water, the destruction of forests, and the depletion of soil, is a baseless canard designed to excuse the wasteful, growth-obsessed, polluting modes of agriculture and commodity production under modern capitalism. It is part of a mythology of the all-powerful consumer who dictates to the owners of the means of production what they should produce and how.
It's also aimed at convincing the public that individual acts of consumer choice are the solution to the problems, rather than changing the way we organize and control the production of goods.
Dont they know that the oceans will be teeming with bluefin tuna as long as market prices are set sufficiently high enough? Ha, those fools!! Otoh, we're not as far from free markets in soylent green as we might prefer to be.
The "accounting" done by our "free market" fundamentalism says it's cheaper to fish a species to the brink of extinction then move onto the next reasonably healthy stock than make any effort to conserve the species. Being owned by large conglomerates now, that have no long term stake in preserving their own branch industries, doesn't help. The frontier style hunting mentality surrounding most primary "industries" makes it fatal.
The obvious idiocy of course is that they cannot even recognise, let alone account for the fact that all these " natural resources" are limited to planet earth, and even the most abstract financial markets need some active businesses to invest in/bet on.
Earlier form of this "thinking" perhaps was Caribbean/Louisiana plantation slaves being literally worked to death and replaced rather than allowed even subsistence levels of food and rest. All slavery being essentially sociopathic in nature of course, possibly the root of this new "corporatism", but these mutually destructive doctrines are not entirely new either.
I stopped eating all Tuna a couple years ago, for what little it's worth.
I think that's true, Erik. I think it was you or someone I was speaking to from the East Coast who suggested that all we have to do to get people to buy sole or even carp more often than the choicest fish is to raise the price up to where Cod is. Cod wasnt considered a top notch fish to eat at one time, and I think it was because it was so plentiful. Apparently Asians are wild about eating Carp, and here the darned things are flooding the upper Mississippi toward the Great Lakes area by the schools of them. I was in a Chinese restaurant in San Fran a few years ago, and there were all kinds of interesting fish and seafood items on everyones tables, and some of it I couldnt really identify in spite of being the connoisseur of seafood I thought I was. And some of it was pretty "fresh" looking to say the least. I think Canadians like myself are sometimes not very adventuresome when it comes to trying different things
I suppose the price of newly "rare" species could make it more fashionable too, at least till they can't even supply the most expensive eateries. Never thought of using the new fashion for "exotic" cod to control invasive Mississippi varieties, just not that Machiavellian so couldn't have been me. :)
There are a few issues I have with those arguments. The first, pushing the price up on endangered species is the capitalist solution (putting a prices on scarcity) and they would argue, as the OP suggests, scarcity is its own price control mechanism. But, as the OP demonstrates, scarcity also leads to higer profits for the corporation or corporations that control the resource, It does not lead to conservation.
Second, the idea that corporations care one way or the other about the continuation or sustainability of a resource is a fallacy. Corporations exist purely for the pursuit of profit. We have seen it in mining towns quite often. The corporation does not open a mine with the purpose of providing a community with a long term viable economy and social purpose. A corporation opens a mine to extract a resource at the lowest possible cost per unit until such time as it is no longer profitable. And then it moves on leaving the community to hire consultants to plot an economic future whicn, invariably, is tourism.
The same is true for fisheries, The corporation is entirely unconcerned with the viability of any fish species but only the profit that can be earned from exploiting the "natural resource". Scarcilty actually works in the favour of corporations especially where demand is inelastic (see last years oil prices and oil industry profits).
When fisheries collapse, and in alll likelihood they will, the investor class stands to benefit from the ownership and control of aqua-culture - fish farms producing fish like substances.
http://www.aquaculture.co.il/markets/markets.html
How much will seafood prices increase by as shortages grow and become more accute?
This is capitalist consumer culture. Natural resources exist only to be exploited and the relationship between any particular resource or group of resources and the continued viability of the planet is of no consequence.
Fishing licenses! Kick-back and graft! Halls of power in Ottawa needed fileting and cleaning out a long time ago. Aye! Dont be fishin' or thar, bye!
You are of course correct, but the investor class is painfully, stupidly wrong here. Fish farms are very much dependent upon wild fish stocks to make feed pellets for the farms. As the oceans become ever more depopulated, sterile and acidic, the farms will be no more.
The trouble, in market terms, is that nobody owns the ocean so nobody has an incentive not to hoover up all the bluefin while they can. It's a tragedy of the commons. The only ways to deal with that are by privatization, which in this case isn't just dumb but also impossible, or through government. It's yet another of these cases where we're missing both an appropriate international institution for the problem and the necessary level of intergovernmental cooperation.
The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons
I'm not really disagreeing with you FM, I just thought Fidel's point was interesting. The profit margins are so high now and the distance between shareholders and resources so far that they don't care if theres a business to pass onto the kids. Neo-liberalism operates on the shared delusion that a dollar can always be converted into some other edible resource later, if not here then the next frontier.
Only points I'd differ perhaps, is that it's still better to see it in terms of modern corporatism than consumer-led capitalism, which at this point has less chance of being overthrown than the US government, and certain market mechanisms could still be used on smaller more localised levels. Rapidly gets too complicated for me, though, on a global scale.
National governments enforcing meaningful international treaties, governments that listen to their populations before corporations, populations that are sufficiently informed to be scared, and well enough funded activists and naturalists to scare them all. More historically grounded, independent, economists teaching in universities would help too. Mass media that isn't fronted by pod people would make a real difference.
The truth is that rightwing neoliberal ideologues in Canada's two old line parties abandoned price controls, wage controls, government-created money and export tariffs some time ago. It's a one size fits all sledge hammer today known as jigging interest rates. The idea behind the neoliberalorama is to hand as much control of Canada's economic decision making as they can over to people who no one ever votes for, like banksters, globo money speculators and foreign bondholders, transnational and even "supranational" corporations. Like I was trying to tell someone in another thread, this isnt the same country that it was when Tommy Douglas and the CCF ruled Saskatchewan. It's not even the same country it was when PET drank of the neoliberal KoolAid by 1984. We basically have maybe a few thousand superrich and powerful people around the world dictating economic agendas and money policies in western countries. And none of them ever run for political office. Political power has become just another commodity for capitalists.
I like Jack. He did his doctoral thesis on global capital flows. He's way more clever about these things than stooges Chretien and Martin and herr Harper could ever hope to be. We can have the kind of populist policies for higher employment and competitive green economies of the future instead of the current state of rust and disrepair. We just gotta vote in an NDP government federally for the once in 140 years. But if you actually prefer to hand powers of resource allocation and essentially how the country is run over to superrich people, foreigners, TNC's, and people you never voted for, then make damned good and sure not to vote NDP.
That would be a misreading of Hardin's essay. The tragedy is one of a hypothetical unregulated commons, discussed because it's an analogy of real-life situations where there's a resource under common or no ownership that can be exploited freely by all comers without regulation. Real medieval commons didn't work that way and didn't suffer the tragedy. They weren't under common ownership either - while the management of the space was often delegated to its users, it was still owned by the local lord or monastery.
A good article on all that here: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00001319/01/buck_NoTragedy.pdf
The link you cited claims that Hardin's conclusions are only valid under capitalism. Perhaps so, but that's a much less compelling criticism today than it would have been when Hardin wrote in 1968 and there was still a non-capitalist world worth speaking of.
A more valid criticism of Hardin is that privatization is an incomplete solution to the tragedy because situations can often arise where unsustainable practices are attractive. For example, the present value of income generated from selling off all the trees in your woodlot and using the cash to invest in something else might be more than the present value of an continuous stream of income from selective logging and replanting. We're still left with the other approach, which is to establish a common set of rules or authority to regulate the use of a common resource.
I think it was in the 1970s or 1980s that socialists did the same thing for poor Venezuelans with granting them deeds to the land they lived on and owned. The socialists were voted out, and it didnt take long for self-interested capitalists to steal all the land from illiterate peasants soon after. A similar thing occurred in 1990's Russia when Russians were given the equivalent of share certificates in valuable public assets. Not realizing what they were worth, impoverished Russians sold them for a pittance to agents working for the oligarchs. It was the greatest theft of the commons since enclosure era England. Marxian theory for primitive accumulation is more true, imo, than rightwing public choice theory.
Peruvian Hernando DeSoto is still on about property ownership for Latin America's peasants. He tells the same story that they don't know what they are missing by not being self-interested capitalist minded entrepreneurs that they could be. They just arent realizing their potential to become landless peasants forced to migrate to the big cities after capitalists obtain the deeds from them by hook or crook. I can imagine Canada's capitalists(and rich foreigners) probably think that native people have too much land on their hands in this country. They should have land titleship, too. Or at least until such time as capitalists can wrangle it away from them. Divide and conquer the self-interested more easily done than having to deal with a united people and collective resolve.
You would think so, but, in fact, the investor class has scientists in employ who will argue more food can be raised from the oceans throuh aqua-culture.
Oh, dear. Another member of The Church. The so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" is a barely concealed effort to hand over what remains of humanity's legacy to the Earth's rapists and looters. Do you want to have this conversation, Doug? But let me ask, are you a true believer in The Church of The Free Market?