The author wrote twelve paragraphs, yet didn't care to mention explicitly which nine nations reached a deal. The answer according to NY Times[1] is the following:
> To take effect, the agreement on a high-latitude fishing ban must be signed by all the countries involved: the United States, Norway, Denmark, Canada and Russia, which all have Arctic shorelines; and South Korea, China, Japan, the European Union and Iceland, which operate ocean trawling fleets.
Thank you NY Times for actually listing the countries involved so succinctly. Unfortunately I have to fault your reporting too. Treaties don't take effect domestically until they are ratified by the involved countries legislatures, not are merely signed. Additionally some treaties have clauses so that they don't take effect until the treaty is ratified by some subset of signatories or by all signatories. It isn't clear which is the case here, but the treaty certainly won't take effect from merely being signed by the nine countries and the EU. It may take years to get the various countries legislatures to ratify. US for example has signed but hasn't ratified the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 [2] or a more recent Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 [3].
> Unfortunately I have to fault your reporting too. Treaties don't take effect domestically until they are ratified by the involved countries legislatures, not are merely signed.
Not always.
Obama didn't take the Paris climate agreement to Congress. I.e., it was never ratified, yet the general sentiment was the US had joined, complied during the Obama administration, and likely would have would under a Clinton administration.
And there were a lot of headlines about the US "leaving" the agreement under Trump, which requires the US having been in.
Of course, the obvious downside to not being ratified is exactly what happened under Trump. That the President can make a unilateral decision to leave the agreement.
That said, if Trump agreed to do this, I imagine there's a good chance it follows through under his administration. (Although with Trump you never know.) And I imagine any subsequent Democratic administration follows through as well.
It can get even weirder. Take the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling which introduced a moratorium on whaling. Norway has signed and ratified the convention, but (per Wikipedia)
"Norway maintains an objection to paragraph 10(e) of the convention (the section referring to the 1986 moratorium). Therefore, that provision is not binding upon Norway and the 1986 IWC global moratorium does not apply to it."
All I can think about now is, is this another agreement that the US is gonna sign and then bail? When are agreements for real for the US?
These kinds of multinational agreements are made to tackle the big problems with long run goals. If every other executive office is gonna hand pick which agreements to meet, they are meaningless.
Signing agreements with no intent to enforce them is a universal problem, not a particularly US problem, nor is failing to fully ratify them even after a "signature". The political calculus is simple; you win plaudits from people who pay attention to words over results (which is a LOT of people in politics, including a lot of people in charge of money flow), and signatures are cheap, results are expensive. There's a lot of signing things that don't ever happen. In general when I hear about an international agreement, I tend to assume it's a no-op until proved further. You can't even get international cooperation with something as economically beneficial to its participants as OPEC, let alone things bigger than that and with fewer positive monetary implications.
It was actually George's administration that changed ratification from merely being a pro forma process to a meaningful step of legislative oversight. George Washington, that is. This was done because neither the president nor Senate were happy with having the Senate be involved in the entire treaty-making process, and so they switched to the ratification step to fulfill the requirements in the Constitution to adhere to the "advice and consent of the Senate" rules. Other nations, as they gained parliamentary democracies, saw what the US did here and adopted it in their legislative practices.
For over 100 years, commercial fishing has been an issue. Atlantic cod was the canonical tragedy of the commons, with early multinational agreements that attempted to fix it. They're still shaky.
On land, we hit a point a long time ago. American Bison are a very illustrative example. Guns and railroads could harvest the whole population in a few seasons. Factory conveyor belts could use all the hides hunters could harvest. Industrial society and commercial hunting just didn't go together. Wild populations can't produce on the scale we can consume.
So basically..the oceans are bigger than the prairies, but arent they essentially the same?
But it's likely there is some sustainable level of harvest. Whitetail deer are an interesting case, predators have been squeezed out so hunting is an important check on the population and my impression is that we tend to manage for a big hunt (license and tourism $$$) rather than a healthy population level.
There is, in a theoretical sense. Possibly not in a practical sense.
A recreational herd/fishery is very different from a commercial one. The scale is smaller. The self interested political incentives are usually overshadowed by social/ecological/altruistic interests. There are no "commercial viability" concerns, so all sorts of arbitrary restrictions aren't a problem. The incentive to cheat is much smaller. Recreational hunters and fisherman always make arbitrary rules about what's "sporting" anyway. Fly fishing only. No baiting... These are usually ways of lowering productivity, not increasing it. The whole thing dovetails nicely with ecosystem preservation, etc.
Commercially, the US decided a long time ago that deer and such should not be commercial commodities. Did they leave some sustainable harvest potential the table? Sure. How big was it? Not big^. But, they took away huge risks of ecological harm.
Same question for ocean fisheries. Are there some theoretically sustainable methods/quotas/rules? Sure. How well will they be written & policed in an international, commercial environment? Questionable? How important is commercial fishing of wild populations to us? Not very, and less important every year.
^Obviously, this is relative. In the context preindustrial economies and their economic output, deer (or trout, etc.) may have been very important. In the 1800s, less so. In the 21s century, the potential contribution of wild deer to the economy is miniscule. Just like you say, recreational value is probably more valuable and than the actual outputs (meat, hides, etc.) even in money terms.
This tragedy of the commons can be solved on the oceans as we've solved it on land, by property rights.
Iceland and New Zealand have decent systems in place, and have a healthy sustainable populations that they harvest.
The basic idea is that if you own the fishing rights to a certain area, it is profitable to let the population grow big before you harvest it. Thus greed motivates conservation.
Commercial fishing is fine, as is hunting - as long as there are healthy populations and the fishing/hunting is within the bounds by which the population of the animals can regrow. Ironically, without the absurd overfishing of the past, we could sustain much higher fishing quotas today than we can with the decimated fish population.
Sustainable -how sustainable? If the only bar is sustaining the annual harvest for the medium term, that's not the highest bar. Commercial fishing can have it mpacts within those bounds that we might still find unacceptable.
.Especially so if you consider how little knowledge we really have about ocean ecologies.
I for one think the goal should be recovery. If you look at old records of major fisheries, I think it's clear that they're depleted now relative to the past. Atlantic cod is well documented. You can see footage of old Australian tuna fishing operations. Clearly, current populations are far smaller. East Atlantic Mackerel fisheries. Herring. The entire mediteranean sea. Salmon...
The other relative is relative value. Even if fisheries can support 1950s (pick a year) harvests, the size/value of that harvest as a percentage of our economy is a lot smaller. This is a long term trend. Relative importance of commercial fish harvests declines over time.
What I am suggesting is that there is a point where it's not worth it.
Well, yes. I was speaking about the fundamental question talking about healt ecosystems. With todays almost erradicated populations there is little doubt that we should mostly stop fishing.
The major difference between the prairies and the oceans is that we humans eat practically every animal the size of a rabbit or bigger, while when it come to sea creatures people are very picky. This result is a very wasteful fishing, especially when looking at historical methods (which hasn't completely stopped yet).
Imagine if people went hunting by setting fire to the forest, only interested in the meat a handful of species. In the wake of destruction a massive desert forms with barely any life left. Do this on a global scale for a few decades, and you have the kind of fishing we had up to the early 2000. We have hopefully outgrown that kind of fishing.
American Bison are an example which sheds light on the problem. The Bison in the commons were exploited to near extinction, but the Bison on private ranchland are plentiful today.
The problem is not commercial fishing or commercial hunting, the problem is a lack of ownership. If you have no means to prevent others from overexploiting a resource, then you have no incentive to protect it; If you don't own the resource and nobody will stop anyone from exploiting it, your best move is to join in exploiting it at whatever rate humanly possible.
Does this just apply to ships registered with a country? What's to stop a ship from registering in Brazil, porting in Russia, and selling cod for dirt cheap to Japan?
It's enforced by fishing in the high artic being pretty conspicuous.
Regarding penalties: With ratification, such treaties become law. There are no penalties specified, but courts are empowered to enforce them by whatever means they deem effective. Environmental groups, for example, could sue the US, in US courts.
Beyond that, international cooperation doesn't rely on penalties or similar sanction mechanisms as much as, for example, criminal law. There simply is no "world government" that would have the power to "enforce by force". But, contrary to armchair politicians everywhere, that doesn't render international law meaningless. It's a system of thousands of treaties and other agreements that, collectively, are net-positive for every country involved. The alternative to respecting them is to be seen as an untrustworthy partner, making it harder, or impossible, to reach future agreements or keep others to their word.
A great, current example is the possibility of the US pulling out of the Iran Deal: Not only would it legitimately allow Iran to then restart their nuclear program. It is also a major factor in the tensions between the US and North Korea. Because NK, quite obviously, is asking themselves: Why should we engage in negotiating a deal, if the US does not feel bound by it?
(The same works in reverse, because NK has also been less-than-stellar in following previous agreements)
Trump has not pulled the US out of any treaties. Treaties, as you say, become law upon ratification; therefore, it requires an act of Congress to repeal them. Now, the Paris climate agreement is an "executive agreement" which does not require ratification of the Senate, and so therefore can be unilaterally withdrawn by the President.
Nor did the US pull out of the Iran deal. Congress attached a rider to the ratification requiring the president to periodically certify Iran's commitment to the deal to continue with the unwinding of sanctions. Trump declined to so certify Iran, but that doesn't affect the treaty in any legal sense. (It certainly does affect the foreign politics of the situation, but at this point it seems clear that the world knows to ignore Trump and just flatter him into thinking he's important and useful).
If you read the post more carefully, specifically the possibility of the US pulling out of the Iran Deal: Not only would it legitimately [...], you'll notice that I never claim Trump pulling out of any treaties– possibility and would indicate the conditionality here. Arguably, the effects I mentioned could also result just from high-level politicians talking about the possibility of unilaterally withdrawing from such deals.
I also didn't use the word 'treaty' anywhere near my mention of Trump, nor did I mention the Paris agreement.
> To take effect, the agreement on a high-latitude fishing ban must be signed by all the countries involved: the United States, Norway, Denmark, Canada and Russia, which all have Arctic shorelines; and South Korea, China, Japan, the European Union and Iceland, which operate ocean trawling fleets.
Thank you NY Times for actually listing the countries involved so succinctly. Unfortunately I have to fault your reporting too. Treaties don't take effect domestically until they are ratified by the involved countries legislatures, not are merely signed. Additionally some treaties have clauses so that they don't take effect until the treaty is ratified by some subset of signatories or by all signatories. It isn't clear which is the case here, but the treaty certainly won't take effect from merely being signed by the nine countries and the EU. It may take years to get the various countries legislatures to ratify. US for example has signed but hasn't ratified the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 [2] or a more recent Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 [3].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/europe/russia-arcti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_Labour_Convention
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...