“Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand.”
-Garrett Hardin
The Tragedy of the Commons process is a process that underlies most, if not all, of the pollution, resource and population problems that the world now faces. It occurs when behaviours that benefit and make sense from individuals’ point of view are repeated enough such that it ultimately leads to disastrous outcomes.
This process usually involves:
- The unrestricted consumption of a large pool of natural resources [common pool resources (CPRs)];
- By each of many self-interested individuals;
- Who benefit from the CPRs and see little harm from their own use of this large pool of resources;
- Such that consumption of these CPRs reaches high levels and become depleted.
The Tragedy of the Commons process can be used to explain the situation of overfishing in the Philippines (applicable to all other countries too).
Overfishing in the Philippines:
Fishers are motivated to fish in the waters of the Philippines due to the presence of a large pool of reef fishes and other seafood that are valued for their high market prices. Each of the many such fishers is self-interested and benefits financially from this large pool of resources. As the ocean is so vast, the fishers assume that the resource pool is so large that each of their large-quantity harvest is seen to be of little harm to the resource pool. Hence they behave in ways that advance their own interest by fishing as much as they could each time they fish. Additionally, as the fishers are aware that for each unit of seafood they forgo, this unit will eventually be harvested by other fisher. As such, each fisher would fish as rapidly as possible, further depleting the common pool of reef fishes and other seafood. Coupled with the fact that the reef fishes and the other seafood are unable to reproduce and replenish their population, which is the common pool, as quickly as the rate at which their kinds are being fished, overfishing occurs.