The Pacific coast salmon resource is at best holding its own in spite of the millions of dollars that have been poured into research, propagation, and regulatory activity. In some areas the resource is subject to continuing depletion. And even in the few cases where stocks have been rebuilt, the potential gains from the scientific and regulatory Program have been dissipated.
When there is open access to a fishery, the regulators cannot stop more people, using more equipment, from going fishing. The usual practice, therefore, is to try to relieve the pressure on the resource by making fishing more difficult and costly, and thereby reducing fishing effort. As the regulations become more restrictive, there is a drift toward greater and greater inefficiency in the use of human and capital resources, which erodes both control and compliance; and the concomitant deterioration of capital equipment leaves the industry increasingly vulnerable to competition, both foreign and domestic. At the same time, the basic irrationality of legislated inefficiency tends to cause widespread discouragement and cynicism in the industry.
In attempts to stave off complete disaster for the Pacific salmon fishery, the regulatory authorities, both state and international, resorted to progressively more stringent restrictions on the efficiency of the gear and the vessels employed. To some extent this merely carried for the inherited mass of regulations, many of which were written when public action had little foundation in scientific knowledge. More often it represented the net result power plays by the competing fishing and processing groups involved. Even more disturbing is the degree to which necessity has become confused with virtue. A discouragingly large proportion of those connected with salmon research and regulatory programs regard reductions in efficiency as not only necessary but desirable in the present setting.
As long as the present situation continues, there can be no real hope of economic health in the fishery. Any increase in relative prices of salmon is promptly swallowed up by increased entry, rising costs, and more stringent pressure on the physical resource and those charged to its management. It simply leads to a new equilibrium, no more satisfactory than the previous one, with a net loss to the economy as a whole as more factors of production are trapped in the fishery.
Adapted from The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study of Irrational Conservation, by James A. Crutchfield and Guilio Pontecorvo, published for RFF by The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1969 issue of Resources magazine.
