LETTER: Reopening northern cod fishery repeats past mistakes
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BY: Josh Laughren
Topics: Rebuild Ocean Abundance
Josh Laughren, Oceana Canada executive director and senior vice president. Originally published on Saltwire.
Recently, Canada’s Fisheries Minister and six other Members of Parliament celebrated reopening the famous northern cod fishery, 32 years after it was shut down due to overfishing and mismanagement, putting over 30,000 people out of work overnight.
If you had asked anyone involved in the fishery then what a successful reopening would look like, I doubt a single person would say this fits the bill. It seems a bleak repetition of the past.
Books have been written on how we got here, but let’s look at recent developments. Last year, based on a new science model using a longer time series, the government lowered the “Limit Reference Point,” a science estimate of the amount of fish necessary to avoid the risk of irreversible damage to the stock. This meant that, for the first time in decades, cod were just barely out of the “critical zone”. To be clear, the model didn’t show that there were more cod in the water, it just lowered the threshold of disaster.
Still, better data is helpful, and it’s better to be out of the critical zone than in it. Of course, the cod population is still only at about 18 per cent of pre-collapse biomass levels and has been stagnant for nearly a decade. But there was hope.
In response to the newly lowered threshold, the commercial moratorium was lifted, with a 38 per cent quota increase over last year’s stewardship fishery.
After 30 years, there is still no agreement on what a healthy stock looks like and how to manage it. A draft rebuilding plan, long in development, was shelved. Canada’s updated Fisheries Act requires rebuilding plans for stocks in the critical zone, but once cod were deemed just above that threshold, the government wasted no time in abandoning that responsibility.
To make matters worse, the government’s own models predict that, with this fishing pressure, northern cod is likely to decline below that new, lowered “Limit Reference Point” within a few years. So much for hope.
Worse still: the decision to increase the cod quota comes on the heels of the Fisheries Minister’s decision to continue overfishing capelin, northern cod’s primary food source (not to mention important food for whales, seabirds, and a host of other species). According to the government’s own data, a major impediment to rebuilding the cod population is the lack of capelin, which is now at just nine per cent of its population size before it too collapsed, in large part due to overfishing. So, we are overfishing cod, and overfishing the main food source that can help it recover.
We could choose differently. Modelling done for Oceana Canada by the University of British Columbia showed that rebuilt northern cod could provide 16 times more jobs and be worth up to five times more than today. With low fishing pressure and favourable environmental conditions, it could recover to healthy levels in 11 years, supporting economic activities worth $233 million in today’s dollars. Oceana Canada modelling showed that if the government prioritized good fisheries management, Canada’s wild fisheries could go from less than 30 per cent considered healthy to more than 80 per cent within 10 years, resulting in up to a million tonnes more seafood worth as much as $2 billion.
But achieving these benefits will require decisions on depleted stocks that prioritize growth and recovery, not stagnation and decline. It will also require ecosystem approaches – like recognizing we can’t overfish capelin, the food cod rely on, and still expect healthy cod.
We know this works: U.S. fisheries law requires steps to be taken when overfishing is deemed to be occurring. This has resulted, so far, in 50 rebuilt stocks, returning on average 50 per cent more revenue to fishers.
We know what success looks like here, too: just this year, the government announced a quota of 60,000 tonnes for Gulf of St. Lawrence redfish, reopening a fishery that had been allowed to fully recover after being closed for nearly 30 years due to overfishing.
Canadian law already requires – at least on paper – stocks to be managed in this common-sense way: reduce quotas as stocks show signs of decline and plan to grow them back to health before they reach the depleted levels of northern cod. Successive governments have not had the courage of their policy convictions, too often giving in to pressure by those who stand to gain in the short term, leaving communities to fight over the scraps of an impoverished ocean.
An abundant ocean, with thriving fisheries, is well within our reach. But it will continue to exceed our grasp unless the choices we make now are different than the ones of the past.
So, you’ll understand if I don’t join in celebrating this announcement to end the cod moratorium – accompanied by assurances that this time, we’ve learned our lessons.
We can still change course. Otherwise, in a few years, when the sad state of northern cod is back in the news, just know that it could have been different.