Friday Fungus: wild mushrooms and the tragedy of the commons

You've got dressed up, hired a cab and are safely seated in that special restaurant for your special occasion. Scanning down the menu your eyes fall on a "mosaic of chicken, wild mushrooms and pistachio nuts - an elegant combination of woody, autumnal flavours packed into a chunky terrine". If you're me, you leap as the prospect of wild mushrooms and place the order for your starter. What you don't do is ask how those wild mushrooms arrived at a posh restaurant in Ilkley. Perhaps it's time to start asking - for the sake of our woodlands and for the sake of us continuing to enjoy the fabulous flavours of those wild mushrooms blessing our palettes.

We're familiar with the tragedy of the commons (although it is often misrepresented):

...each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himself, “Should I add another animal to my herd?” Because the herdsman owned his animals, the gain of so doing would come solely to him. But the loss incurred by overloading the pasture would be “commonized” among all the herdsmen. Because the privatized gain would exceed his share of the commonized loss, a self-seeking herdsman would add another animal to his herd. And another. And reasoning in the same way, so would all the other herdsmen. Ultimately, the common property would be ruined.

So it is with wild foraging for mushrooms.

The New Forest Association (NFA) says there's growing anger over "commercial gangs" invading and filching fungi to flog to posh hotels and restaurants in back-door deals.

Experts have warned the gangs could even kill because pickers who don't know the different species are likely to take deadly toadstools and other poisonous fungi in mistake for edible and safe mushrooms.

Forestry Commission bosses have now vowed to "disrupt" commercial pickers plundering this autumn's crop - but campaigners are demanding an outright ban.

This same story is repeated across our woodlands - from Epping Forest to Ogden Water you'll see evidence of large scale mushroom gathering. How else did you think all those wild mushrooms arrived in all those restaurants? And the easy result of authorities is to introduce a ban:

Authorities in London's Epping Forest have been stopping and searching walkers in an attempt to catch foragers who are stripping the woodland of fungi.

Forest keepers are trying to crack down on the harmful practice after gangs of foragers descended on the woodland in vans to cart away hauls of mushrooms which are then sold to restaurants.

The plants can fetch up to £50 per kilo as the trend for foraged food in upmarket restaurants in London and around the country has sent demand soaring.

The problem is that, as we know too well, a ban would simply drive up the price and make it worth the while to carry on foraging (the downside risk is probably pretty small). Even if we banned restaurants from selling wild mushrooms - imagine the foodie cries of pain - there's still be a market at the restaurant backdoor at an even higher price.

Instead of banning foraging would it not be more sensible (and lucrative) for places like Epping Forest and the New Forest to auction off the rights to crop the mushrooms? Trust me, if you've forked out thousands of quid for something you'll be making really sure people don't arrive and steal it from you. The owners of the rights would back up the local keepers and wardens to stop the poaching of fungi - we'd have an industry interested in a sustainable product rather than a collection of uncontrolled exploiters of common rights.

Despite this, I'll bet you that the choices of authorities will be the ban not the licence.
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Friday Fungus: the economics of Himalayan mushroom foraging

The Yartsa Gunbu (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) is a weird little fungus that infests a species of Chinese caterpillar eventually growing out from the head of the creature. It is cherished in Chinese medicine and, if you're writing tabloid headlines, the term 'Chinese viagra' is recommended.

The problem is that, as China has got richer, these prized traditional medicines have got ever more prized and ever more expensive. And the Yartsa Gunbu isn't farmed but foraged - this is hunter gathering. So it presents a problem - as Tim Worstall (slightly polemically) puts it:

There are those out there who think that we should return rather to our hunter gatherer roots. Simply pick from nature’s bounty rather than intensively farm the planet. There’s really only one problem with this delightful idea: we’d all starve within months having stripped the Earth of everything edible

Indeed this is very much an issue with Yartsa Gunbu especially given how important it has become for the economy of part of Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet:

With an eight-fold increase in value from ¥4,800 to ¥40,000 per pound (Winkler 2008b: 18) yartsa gunbu has become the mainstay of household economies across the Tibetan Plateau and in the highlands of Nepal, India, and Bhutan. It fills an economic void in Tibetan areas of China that state-sponsored development projects, which tend to focus on infrastructure, do not always satisfy.

So it's no surprise that there are reports of violence, extortion and criminal activity linked to the collection of this valuable product. Plus suggestions that the high prices lead to over-exploitation and the destruction of future production. So it is interesting to see how different communities have responded to this situation and to the threat of over-exploitation. In some areas the Yartsa Gunbu is found on land that is in existing private (or local village) ownership and, as a result the harvest is leased out by the land owner who secure the income in rent rather than by selling the fungus. Elsewhere a controlled number of permits are issued to outsiders and they are limited to specific locations.

However, Geoff Childs and Namgyal Choedup in an article in Himalaya report on two areas that use a different regulatory method to control the exploitation of the Yartsa Gunbu:

Using data from household surveys and in-depth interviews, the authors describe the process of gathering and selling yartsa gunbu within the parameters of management practices that combine religious and secular regulations over natural resources. The authors conclude with a discussion of the indigenous management system in relation to sustainable development.

The review concludes that regulation limiting collection is essential - what different communities have done is limit who can collect and when they can collect. Some, such as the places studied by Childs & Choedup, use traditional controls (religious tradition, inherited collection rights and regulation of collector behaviour) whereas others use more 'modern' approaches such as licensing, permits and leases to limit collection and provide incentives to protect the long-term supply.

The lesson of this is that, for all our modern urban idolising of wild foraging, this practice is pretty bad news for the environment if it is not controlled. As we see with UK demand for wild mushrooms (all that soup and pasta in all those gastro-pubs) and other foraged goods, the result is a problem:

Epping Forest, an ancient woodland straddling the border of greater London and Essex, is one of the best fungi sites in the country, with over 1,600 different species. But, like other fungi-rich sites such as the New Forest, it is being stripped out by illegal picking by gangs believed to sell the wild mushrooms to restaurants and markets

Perhaps rather than - as has happened in Epping Forest - simply banning foraging, we should pay a visit to Nepal and look at how they manage their harvest of an (admittedly pretty odd) wild mushroom.

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Politics and the tragedy of the commons

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In the context of Hardin's classic 'Tragedy of the Commons' essay, I was struck by the truth of this observation:

One thing that Hardin overlooked is that the political process often replicates the same economic dynamic that encourages the tragedy of the commons -- a dynamic fostered by the ability to capture concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. Like the herder who has an incentive to put out yet one more animal to graze, each interest group has every incentive to seek special benefits through the political process, while dispersing the costs of providing those benefits to the public at large. Just as no herder has adequate incentive to withhold from grazing one more animal, no interest group has adequate incentive to forego its turn to obtain concentrated benefits at public expense. No interest group has adequate incentive to put the interests of the whole ahead of the interests of the few. The logic of collective action discourages investments in sound public policy just as it discourages investments in sound ecological stewardship.

The rest of the article is worth a read and addresses the importance of property rights in driving environmental improvement and conservation.

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Academic publishing and the 'tragedy of the commons'

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I'm sure Mr Worstall did so inadvertently but his castigation of the Royal Society's 'save the planet' report also explained another first world problem - why 'open access' publishing doesn't work:

"...if you have an open access commons and then demand for that resource exceeds the regenerative capacity of the resource, then you have to move away from a Marxian (his word) open access commons to some form of limitation of access. This limitation of access could be social (socialist) or private property (capitalist) but some form of limitation there must be."

You see that the problem for academics (and university libraries - although this is mostly special pleading to protect their budgets) is that 'open access' still uses up the limited resource of time and money available for the purpose of publishing. And because the user is not paying, that money and time isn't replaced. Or rather, the taxpayer's representatives trim the money available as they choose to direct it to other purposes.

So the outcome of 'open access' publishing won't, in the end, be open access but will be access that is rationed or controlled in someway. Most likely, since this is how the world works, by charging users for the use they make of the resource. However, it will be the Universities that collect this money rather than publishers.

And where did all those publishers start? Oh, yes - universities. Looks to me more and more like a power grab rather than a liberalisation of access.

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