Economic Reasons Why Global Fisheries Must be Overfished

In this contribution, I will provide economic reasons why most of the world's fisheries must be currently overfished. To start with, I consider a fishery overfished if it is being exploited using fishing effort that is higher than the fishing effort that would deliver maximum discounted economic rent from the fishery. Given this definition, I will present a number of theoretical and empirical arguments to show that most of the world's fisheries can be described as overfished currently. Next, I expand the notion of overfishing to include fishing that undermines the existence value of marine resources and impacts the ability of future generations to meet their own animal protein needs from capture fisheries. This expanded definition of overfishing leads me to conclude that conventional approaches to economic valuation imply that global marine resources are currently overfished, for the most part.