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Articles

The problem of property in industrial fisheries

 

Abstract

Fisheries systems are widely considered to be ‘in crisis’ in both economic and ecological terms, a considerable concern given their global significance to food security, international trade and employment. The most common explanation for the crisis suggests that it is caused by weak and illiberal property regimes. It follows that correcting the crisis involves the creation of private property rights that will restore equilibrium between the profitable, productive function of fishing firms and fish stocks in order to maximize ‘rent’. In this approach, coastal states are seen as passive, weak, failed and/or corrupted observers and facilitators of the fisheries crisis, unless they institute private property relations. This paper offers an alternative analysis by using the perspective of historical materialism to re-examine longstanding debates over the problem of property and its relation to ground-rent in industrial fisheries. It identifies coastal states as modern landed property, enabling an exploration of the existence of and struggles over surplus value, and drawing attention to the role of the state and the significance of the environmental conditions of production in understanding political-ecological conditions in fisheries. As on land, property in the sea is a site of social struggle and will always remain so under capitalism, no matter which juridical interest holds the property rights.

Authorship of this paper is fully collaborative. We thank the anonymous reviewers, Henry Bernstein, Chris Carr, Gavin Capps, Ben Fine, Louise Fortmann, Phil Steinberg and, especially, Dick Walker for comments on prior drafts. We thank Amanda Henley for carefully making the maps. We also thank participants at the following events for feedback and discussion: ‘Symposium on economic (in)security and the global economy’ at Queen Mary University of London, ‘Grabbing green’ at the University of Toronto, ‘Food sovereignty: a critical dialogue’ at Yale University, ‘International relations, capitalism and the sea’ at Birkbeck, University of London, and Agrarian Change Seminar at SOAS, University of London. Remaining errors are ours.

Notes

1 The ‘territorial seas’ have a higher level of political sovereignty than the rest of the EEZ and are often reserved for smaller-scale fishing activities.

2 For example, in 2012 the Bank launched the ‘Global Partnership for the Oceans’, an alliance of hundreds of governments, international organizations, civil society groups and private sector interests to address threats to the health, productivity and resilience of the oceans.

3 For more on the differences between the two see Gee (Citation1981) and Patnaik (Citation1983). For further debate on rent theory see Fine (Citation2013).

4 On conceptual confusion on property regimes and natural resources, see Schlager and Ostrom (Citation1992); for a broad overview of debates over access and property in fisheries, see Campling et al. (Citation2012).

5 Along with capital and wage labor. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss fisheries production sensu stricto or other dynamics of the capital-labor relation.

6 In contrast to approaches to political economy that are not historicised, the ‘modern’ in landed property denotes that the category exists only under conditions of generalised commodity production. Landed property has existed through history, but its characteristics under capitalism are specific, at least in ‘its purely economic form’ (Marx Citation1981, 751, 755), i.e. the struggle for surplus value in the form of ground-rent.

7 Tribal-landed property could be deployed, with modifications to reflect particular historical and social conditions, to analyze some coastal fisheries managed as common property and overseen by customary authorities (often social and political elites).

8 We use scare quotes here because the national interest is an ideological construct: what is purported to be of interest to ‘the nation’ is very often of interest to the ruling elite or elements thereof.

9 A form of redistributive rent (Walker Citation1974).

10 This speaks to efforts to theorize state sovereignty (including over transboundary resources) as formulated with extra-territorial influences (see e.g. Ong Citation2006, Lunstrum Citation2013).

11 Neoclassical natural resource rent – unlike neoclassical monopoly rent, for example – is normally seen as having an efficiency-enhancing role, but only where property rights (not necessarily private ones) stop the dissipation of rent by encouraging producers (e.g. fishers) to focus on the marginal rather than the average cost of their activities, with the latter producing the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Khan Citation2000).

12 Just as capital appropriates a ‘free gift’ from labor in the form of surplus labor, it appropriates free gifts of nature. While it costs money to fish and these expenses are the focus of mainstream economics' calculations of rent, the fish reproduce without capitalist investment. The gift of natural reproduction can be described as an ‘ecological surplus’ – ‘the gap between appropriated and capitalized natures’ (see Moore Citation2011, 129; for a partial extension to tuna fisheries, Campling Citation2012b). Debates on the ‘free gifts’ of nature, fish as a means of production and implications for ground-rent are beyond the scope of this contribution.

13 For a theoretical discussion of how surplus profit is produced and then transformed into ground-rent, see Marx (Citation1981, 780–7).

14 For Ricardo (Citation1996, 46), rent is ‘that compensation which is paid to the owner of land for the use of its original and indestructible powers’. While Ricardo assumed the qualities of soil are ‘indestructible’, Marx's study of agronomy and soil science revealed natural qualities as changeable and noted the ‘brutal exhaustion of the soil’ being driven down by ‘the entire spirit of capitalist production … orientated towards the most immediate monetary profit’ (Marx Citation1981, 756, 754 fn 27).

15 ‘[T]he land bears the rent not because capital has been invested in it but rather because the capital investment has made the land a more productive field of investment than before’ (Marx Citation1981, 880).

16 One of Marx's extensions of Ricardo's theory of rent is to demonstrate that it is impossible to delineate between the two types of differential rent in practice because they interact rather than simply being additive (e.g. a capital investment in the form of differential rent II might enhance differential rent I) (Harvey Citation2006, 354–7).

17 While in theory types of rent can be delineated, in practice, actual payments by capital to landed property may include more than surplus profits. For example, actual payment of ground-rent can contain ‘foreign component[s]’ such as a landlord's capture of a portion of the average profit and/or of normal wages. Marx uses the category of lease price to indicate these phenomenal possibilities (Marx Citation1981, 763). We recognise the importance of the category lease price when discussing actual payments from fishing firms to coastal states, but use the term ground-rent for parsimony.

18 Fishing boats and gear are investments in the means of production rather than investments that enhance the productivity of the fishery. In other words, they are investments in extraction, rather than in enhancing the conditions for extraction.

19 On the socio-ecological implications of FAD use in the Indian Ocean, see Campling (Citation2012b).

Additional information

Liam Campling teaches at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. His main research interests are in international political economy and uneven development, commodity chain analysis (with an empirical emphasis on tuna), the history and theory of capitalism and the political economy of development in island states in the Western Indian and Pacific oceans. He is a Book Reviews Section Co-editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and a Corresponding Editor of Historical Materialism.

Elizabeth Havice is an assistant professor of international development and globalization in the Geography Department at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Her work is on the political economy of resource regulation, production and consumption in natural resource systems. Much of her empirical research is on the tuna industry that spans the Pacific Rim. Campling and Havice have co-authored articles that have appeared in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Global Environmental Politics and Environment and Planning A. They also recently co-edited a 12-article special issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change on the political economy and ecology of capture fisheries.

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