• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 593 0

fact that decimated cod stocks have been restored fairly quickly in other countries. In 1989, the Norwegian government realized its cod stocks were in a serious decline. It severely restricted the fishery, putting many fishermen, fish-plant workers, and boat builders out of business and drastically reducing the size of its fleet. The northern Finnmark region had an unprecedented 23 percent unemployment rate. But because the government instituted these measures while the stock was still commercially viable, while there were still some large spawners left, the cod population stabilized and started increasing after a few years. Peter Gati of the Norwegian Seafood Export Council said of the Canadian situation, “I guess politicians didn’t have the courage to put people out of business.” But in Norway, courage combined with good fortune and a fast-growing cod stock. When the cod stocks in the Barents Sea were measured in the fall of 1992, government planners were as surprised as they had been in 1989. After the two most productive years ever recorded in this stock, the cod population was healthy again.

Agust Olafsson, a deckhand aboard the Ver, poses with a cod for the ship’s chef, Gudbjartotur Asgeirsson, circa 1925. Asgeirsson, who cooked on Icelandic trawlers between 1915 and 1940, often took photographs. (National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik)

In 1994 the Canadian government estimated that its moratorium would last until the end of the century. Since then, politicians have tried to speed up the process. But in Canada, if everything else went well, about fifteen years would be needed to restore the population. A healthy population requires some large old spawners, and such fish in the northern stock are about fifteen years old. It is hard to imagine the Canadians holding off that long, going a generation without cod fishing. As George Rose, the fishery scientist at St. John’s Memorial University, suggested, political pressure makes it almost impossible to maintain a moratorium until cod stocks have returned to historic levels. Rose, who had been a leading voice calling for the moratorium, said, “I am not optimistic that we will ever let it come back to what it was. If we get 300,000, there will be unbearable pressure to fish it.”

Periodically a “food fishery” is announced. For one weekend, locals are allowed to fish cod for their own consumption. After such weekends, cod suddenly becomes available, sold off the back of pickup trucks. And yet local politicians complain that the food fisheries are too short. The mayor of Lewisporte said that some people worked on weekends and she “wanted everyone to have a chance.”

In the October 1996 Globe & Mail article, Fisheries minister Fred Mifflin said that the Sentinel fishermen were reporting increased number and size. “The fish are fatter, they are healthier, so we know for sure that the decline has ceased.” This does not at all correspond with the findings of Sam Lee and his Petty Harbour colleagues, but they are only six out of 400 Sentinel fishermen in Newfoundland. A closer look at Mifflin’s data reveals that these good results were in southern Newfoundland, where waters are warmer and growth is faster. In fact, the cod there are a completely separate population from the northern stock, which inhabit the waters off the rest of Newfoundland, Labrador, and the Banks. This again illustrates what Ralph Mayo calls “the perception problem.”

Weeks before Mifflin’s statement, Rose said, “We found 15,000 cod in the South Bay, and everyone said the cod are back. Hold on! Ten years ago, the biomass, the population, was 1.2 million.”

Some propose to give nature a hand. When the Norwegian fishery was in crisis, the government there invested heavily in experimental cod farming. Once the wild stocks returned, the Norwegians immediately lost interest in farming because it was more expensive. But fish farmers had been technically successful in transferring wild juveniles to pens and feeding them until they were thick and large. The cod were even trained to come at feeding time.