Canada Closes Newfoundland Cod Fisheries

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland, Canada, April 28, 2003 (ENS) - The government of Canada has announced the closure of three cod stocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and northeast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Recent scientific assessments of the stocks determined they are at historically low levels and show no signs of imminent recovery despite a decade of severe conservation measures.

In 2000, these three cod stocks were worth about C$23 million in landed value, compared to about C$1.8 billion for the entire Atlantic fishery. The landed value of these stocks has been steadily decreasing for more than a decade. They were valued at C$163 million in 1990.

The government has pledged to spend $50 million on a four part action plan to assist individuals and communities which will be most affected by the closure and to expand scientific research into the serious decline of these cod stocks.

The government will put $44 million over two years toward community based economic development assistance. The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Canada Economic Development – Quebec will manage the funds to provide assistance for short term job creation. Human Resources Development Canada will assist affected individuals and businesses by offering programming under the Employment Benefits and Support Measures. In Quebec and New Brunswick, similar measures are delivered by the province.

The Canadian government will work with stakeholder groups and with provincial governments to determine by the fall of 2003 what further measures will be required for a comprehensive approach to strengthening the sustainability of local economies, and diversifying the economic base of communities.

The conservation measures planned, including the creation of seal exclusion zones, indicate the government believes seals are responsible for the fall in cod populations.

The conservation measures also include no trawling zones, the closure of the recreational cod fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and northeast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and, for the next three years, a 40 percent reduction in the total allowable catch of capelin, an important food source for cod.

The government will put $6 million towards a two year scientific research program to expand on current activities to evaluate and assess the impact of seals on fish stocks.

"The investment in science will help us learn more about the relationship between seals and fish stocks," said the Fisheries Minister Robert Thibault. "Conservation of the resource is critical. It is my responsibility to protect these important resources when they are in such obvious danger. It is my duty to take firm action to ensure this resource is preserved for future generations."

This closure comes 20 years after the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, founded by Canadian Paul Watson, advised the Canadian government and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to establish a moratorium on cod fishing. Despite much lower catch quotas enacted over the last decade, the cod populations have remained extremely low, in sharp contrast to the bountiful numbers seen just 25 years ago.

Captain Watson, aboard the Sea Shepherd conservation vessel Farley Mowat observed, "As is typical of the DFO, it's too little, too late. It's a case of closing the barn door after the rustlers have stolen all the horses. By closing the fishery, the DFO is admitting that it grossly mismanaged the fishery. Sea Shepherd holds the Canadian government and the DFO directly responsible for this terrible mismanagement."

Watson, who has worked for a halt to the annual Canadian seal hunt since the mid-1970s, says the cod closures lead to doubt on how the DFO can manage the hunting of other species, including the seal populations that live and breed in the same area. "The Canadian government permitted over 350,000 harp seals to be needlessly slaughtered this spring - the highest seal quota ever and the largest marine mammal hunt in the world," Watson said.

An additional 700,000 seals are scheduled to be hunted in the next two years, according to the DFO.

Watson says, "Many of the seal hunters include former cod fisherman who are subsidized by the Canadian government to kill seals as an alternate vocation. The pressure on seals may increase now that the cod fishery has been closed and more fisherman are thrown out of work."

Of 10 managed cod stocks on Canada’s East Coast, there are three stocks in particular that concern the department – Northern Cod (2J3KL), Northern Gulf (3Pn /4RS) and Southern Gulf (4TVn). Catches of Atlantic cod stocks and landed values have dropped dramatically over the past 10 years.

Of the Total Allowable Catch of 20,000 metric tons set in 2000 for these three stocks, fishers harvested approximately 18,000 tons.

Of the 6,380 groundfish license holders entitled to fish for cod from these three cod stocks in 2000, only 3,882 actually fished for cod – mostly in small quantities.

Almost half of these license holders relied on cod for less than 10 percent of their total fishing income. The 288 licence holders who relied totally on cod for their entire fishing income earned less than C$10,000.

In total, the government of Canada has spent $3.9 billion for income support, industry adjustment measures and economic development assistance programs for the Atlantic fishing industry between 1992-2001.

A total of 1,769 fishers opted for early retirement and 3,686 licences were retired through the four economic assistance programs started in the 1990s.

In 1992, Canada closed the Georges Bank cod fishery farther south due to the crash of cod populations.

Everyone's heard the old joke about how if the government was in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 10 years, there'd be a shortage of sand.

Well, it's no joke. The Grand Banks fishery, the greatest in the world, the foundation of four centuries of Newfoundland economy and lifestyle, has been throttled and managed to death by paid agents of the State....
...who will retire with fat pensions, while the fisherman grieve.

Down with socialism! Heads on pikes!

Well, where government may have been responsible was with subsidies and low-interest loans for people to buy boats and get into commmercial fishing(The US did it in the 70s and it was a disaster.)

It wasn't regulations. I'm as free-trade and no government interference as they come, but fisheries are a "Tragedy of the Commons" problem.

Left alone commercial fishermen will completely destroy fisheries stock after fisheries stock. Because they don't "own" any fish or fishing territory, and most fish are so migratory that "owning" an area to fish would be worthless.

And also, as the stock of a given species crashes, they get rarer, and because fewer are caught, the price commercial fishermen get per pound goes up, so they keep making money catching fewer fish, and can invest in better equipment to track down the last few fish of a stock in a cycle of destruction.

I found this article confusing. The suggestion is that Newfoundland fisheries are being closed, and the fishing village shown (LaPoile) is in fact on the southern coast, accessible only by ferry from Rose Blanche or Hermitage Bay to the east.

But this fishing area has essentially been shut down for ten years, except for "fish days" for the locals, where it isn't worth the gas to go out to catch the 10 or so cod permitted. And the reference to "northeast of Newfoundland" puts you somewhere east of Labrador in the Atlantic Ocean (the St. Lawrence Gulf is way over next to Quebec).

Anyway, my impression from lots of time spent in Newfoundland is that the demise of the cod population is directly traceable to aggressive "sucking-up-the-fish-and-everything-else" techniques in the middle of the 20th century, mostly through the Russians and other foreign contracts let by the Canadian government after Newfoundland confederation in 1949.

But cod tongue, crisply fried, is delicious and can still be had in Newfoundland.

I'm aware of the Tragedy of the Commons. This was one exceptionally rich commons, however. It's been like watching the Vanishing of the Buffalo 130 years ago. It's hard to believe they could kill off such a seemingly prolific species.

But you're right; it was the subsidies more than the regulation that destroyed the fishery. But bad DFO science shielded this rape from the public eye.

The Federal Government, not the fishermen, is responsible for the ignorant plundering of the codfish resource.

I remember that when the draggers and factory ships first showed up on the Grand Banks just after WWII, the inshore fishermen said that they would destroy the Grand Banks fishery.

The Ottawa based scientists disagreed. The words commonly used were: "The sea is an inexhaustible supply of protein".

The fishermen with their grade 8 educations were right and the scientists with their post-graduate degrees were wrong.

In New England north of 42 deg. Latitude, Recreational boaters and charter boats are under restrictions now that started last December.

The subject is to complicated and the rules so apparently silly that I won't go into them.

This has opened the door to the preservationists to push for Marine Parks to stop all fishing. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they worked behind the scenes to do in the Canadian fishermen. Some of the Canadian enviro groups are working with New England groups to kill our fishing here.

To give you an idea of what we are up against, just to keep on recreational fishing here is some info on the size of the opposition.

credit to Alan Caruba

You will be astonished to learn that there are more than 4,000 environmental groups in America today. "And the number is growing," warns Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, "and they are really out to get you." Worse, they have the clout and the money to do it." They use it to lobby and support members of Congress to initiate legislation harmful to the interests of all Americans.

Hugo Gurdon of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a recent National Post article, noted, "The 12 biggest environmental pressure groups in the United States enjoy combined annual revenues of $1.95 billion, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service figures. Only 725 of the United States' 20 million companies can boast such magnificent cash flow."

"Among the green dozen are some-Nature Conservancy ($731 million) and the Wildlife Conservation Council ($311 million)-that are merely left-of-center. But there are genuinely extreme organizations-the World Wildlife fund ($118 million) and the Sierra Club ($73 million)-that militate aggressively against the free market and attack property rights to the detriment of the economy and the majority of ordinary people," said Gurdon.

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