alt Hacker NewsIt is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
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What you’re describing is different from what the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is doing. They’re essentially strip mining the ocean thousands of miles away from China, leaving the locals to deal with the ecological damage and resulting consequences.
Sink boats until the behavior changes. Behavior won't change until a sufficient number of boats sink. Decades of talking and explaining and diplomacy and politics have failed. The only two options remaining are accepting the status quo or sinking boats. Anything else is performative.
More specifically, I'd call it a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
The simplest solution is to make the fishing rights for the waters a property that can be bought and sold.
If you overfish in that system, you get no income in the future years, so greed will make you manage the fish responsibly.
This is probably very hard to do within the current international law framework.