But what will Gylfason's proposition do? Place the market in the hands of those who can pay most, called here (in obedience with markety-market theory) the "most efficient", in fact the big fellows with the most capital. This means the elimination by the market of small fishermen, and the consecration of industrial fisheries. We are asked to suppose that control (and market) mechanisms would be sufficient to obtain respect of quotas.
But industrial fishing poses other problems. The destruction of the ecology of the seabed by trawler nets is an obvious one, interrupting the food chain and making it less likely than ever that stocks of many species may be reconstituted. Gylfason addresses the economy of fishing, but not the ecology.
Much stricter regulations on the size of boats and the types of nets need to be applied. That would go against Gylfason's vision of "efficient" "firms" with money, in other words against capitalisation. Let the small guys do the fishing, there'll be less harm done. Fish will be more expensive (and I'm an elitist once again)? Fish is going to be more expensive anyway.
A ban should be much easier to enforce than quotas.
But not politically.
This is the same old issue - vested interests with a culture of predation and exploitation, which are unwilling to let go until the host is dead.
We need better rhetoric and - as usual - wider media saturation to change the narrative before the problem can be tackled.
There's no point making practical suggestions, no matter how sensible they are, when no one is listening to them.
It's the culture of exploitation - in every possible sense - that has to be changed. It has to be named for it is, and all of its many different manifestations have to be tied together and debunked.
Once that's happened, actual solutions to real problems will become possible. Until then, any realistic planning is going to run into the usual nonsense about markets and industries and economic benefits.
The problems are systemic, and - currently - terminal.
