One of the major causes of overifshing is the fact that fishing grounds are free acess and there are no limits to who can fish where, and any regulations about fishing qoutas are loosely enforced. Control over the ocean lays ou of the juristriction of any country.. Because people cannot imagine that there is a limit to how many fish in the ocean, it leads to a phunomenon known as tradgy of the commons.Tragedy of the Commons is a concept coined by Garrett Harding in 1968, explaining that individuals will overexploit shared renewable resources that everyone has access to, or commons for their personal benefit. People get much more from overusing this resource then the cost of the longer term effects of what they are doing, which will destroy the resource for everyone. This issue has occured on nuemorouse ocasions with the fishing industry. A partular example of this occuring is the overfishing of cod from the Grand Banks Fisheries off the coast of Newfoundland. Fishermen have fished in this area for the seemingly unlimited numbers of cod, which was a renewable resource. In the 1960’s and 1970’s as commerical fishing took hold. the rate that the fish were being caught was faster than the fish could breed, which caused the population to start to decrease, and this renewable resource became much less available by 1990. The Grand Banks Fishing Industry had nothing left to catch, which lead to the collapse of this corporation. Because of lack of regulation and management of the fisheries, the ecosystem that the cod were apart of collapsed, as the sustainable yield of the cod was surpassed, and the population became low beyond recovery, and still is today.
Overfising causes
Open Acess Fisheries