This New York Times story details how rampant poaching in the former Soviet Union is threatening sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea. Despite extensive conservation regulations, overfishing continues, fueled by corruption.

These fishermen are poachers, chasing one of the world's most threatened and coveted fish, although judging by the indifferent police officers stationed a few hundred yards away, even highly organized poaching here carries few risks.

No resource, not even the oil that has shaped this region's politics and economies, is more richly associated with the Caspian basin than the sturgeon, a group of primeval fish bound to human history along the shores of the world's largest landlocked body of water. Once fare for pashas and czars, its briny eggs are among the most valuable wildlife commodities on earth.
Now, scientists say, the Caspian's sturgeon risk entering a final downward spiral.

The fish have faced compounding problems for decades. Dams have walled off their spawning grounds. Pollution has silted and choked waterways. But the sturgeon's latest enemy may be its most lethal: corruption.

Since the Soviet Union's collapse, unchecked fishing and struggling hatcheries have led to catches of less than 10 percent of historic highs. As much as 80 percent of the remaining fish are male, scientists say, the lopsided result of years of harvesting females for eggs.

This is tragic, but eminently predictable. The Caspian is a regulated commons that produces a valuable resource in an relatively poor region of the world -- and such regulated commons are almost always overused. If proscriptive regulations do a poor job of conserving fish stocks or other living resources in developed nations with highly professional and independent regulatory bureaucracies, they are a disaster everywhere else.

As I discuss at some length here, regulatory approaches to conserving wildlife resources tend to fail. As we've learned in this context, as well as with fisheries, creating some form of property rights is far more effective. Not only do such rules create incentives for conservation, they create incentives to maintain and enforce theunderlying legal rules. Thus, the legal regime reinforces the economic interests of local populations, whereas proscriptive regulations seek to suppress such incentives.

The Times writer doesn't get it, however, and assumes that only observance of government rules can save the sturgeon

With such prices, the short-term market logic militates against conservation. As sturgeon become more scarce, they become more coveted, pushing prices higher and creating greater incentive to fish. The dynamic is perfectly counterproductive: the best money is in the eggs, the part of the fish needed to replenish stocks.

The circumstance with sturgeon is similar to resource scarcities in many developing countries. Rules are on the books. The tension lies in waiting to see how long it takes countries like Azerbaijan, which rigged much of its parliamentary elections in November, to accept the notion of rule of law.

The rule of law would be nice, but without property rights of some sort, sturgeon populations will continue to decline.