New Zealanders are an irascible lot when it comes to recreational fishing.  Around 50,000 people have made submissions opposing options for tightening recreational snapper fishing limits. This was floated in a government discussion document.

Property rights 101 explains that over-exploitation of a resource is less likely to occur if ownership rights are clearly, fully assigned and would-be poachers can be readily excluded.

This is because such owners have an incentive to conserve the resource today because they are assured of the right to take it tomorrow. After all, this is why farmers preserve their breeding stock!

Transferable, commercial fishing quota, owned in perpetuity, create an incentive for owners to maximise the sum of their profit from catching their annual quota, and the end-of-year value of that quota. This gives them a good reason to preserve the future profitability of the fishing stock.

The incentive to conserve the fishing stock today is not as strong for open-access recreational fisheries. Conservation-minded recreational fishers can't stop others from catching the fish they leave behind, and they don't have a transferable property right in the future value of the stock.

Commercial fishers who wish to increase their annual catch have to purchase a greater annual entitlement from someone else. In contrast, a recreational fisher going out more often is not confronted with the cost that a greater annual catch imposes on others. The incentives to catch more fish this year are very different.

A submission by Seafood New Zealand presents evidence for this: while the annual commercial quota for snapper zone 1 has remained unchanged since 1997, the recreational catch has increased by an estimated 75%.

According to the government’s discussion document, research indicates the annual snapper catch could be increased by 4,500 tonnes to 12,000 tonnes if further restraint on the annual catch is exercised now. The debate for the fishing industry is a hard one to have, given the more exploitative incentive structure in recreational fishing.

Is there scope here for advancing from ‘Property Rights 101’ to ‘Property Rights 201’ thinking?   For example, would recreational fishers be prepared to contemplate the one-off creation of a range of very long-term transferable recreational fishing rights?

The holder of such a right would be entitled to, for example, nine fish per outing regardless of the limit for someone who did not own any long-term right. But, if they wanted to add a friend, they would have to buy another licence.

Threats to species imply incomplete property rights. More secure property rights for serious committed recreational fishers might help.