CONSERVATION:: THE LOST KEY TO HIGHER COD LANDINGS

 We see it at just about every fisheries meeting, or at least those where more restrictive regulations are under discussion. 

Someone, maybe a state fishery manager, maybe a representative of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission or a regional fishery management council, will stand up in front of the crowd and, after carefully laying out the science and landings data affecting a particular fishery, will explain why landings must be reduced to maintain the health of the relevant fish stock.

At that point the circus usually begins, with elements of the commercial and recreational fishing industries contesting the need for new regulations, telling the biologists that their science is wrong, and complaining that any new rules would put them out of business.

While that pattern seems to hold true regardless of the fish being managed, it is a particular fit to the New England cod fishery, where both the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine stocks have been repeatedly found to be very badly depleted, fishermen have continuously and adamantly argued that existing regulations are too severe, and are forcing them out of business.

But some recent research, which examined long-term harvest patterns, suggests that if fishermen had been quicker to embrace regulation, and if conservation measures were imposed on Atlantic cod before the fishing fleet had an opportunity to deplete fish stocks, cod landings would be much higher and more profitable today.

That study looked not at the cod population off New England, but instead focused farther north, on the cod caught off Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador, using catch data that reached back all the way to 1508, and extended forward to the present time.  It found that, for almost all of that period, cod abundance remained stable, and that it wasn’t until the 1960s that it began to decline.

The study also found that, once the decline began, Canadian regulators missed a golden opportunity to halt the decline, and create a cod fishery that was sustainable in the long term.  But, because such opportunity was missed, the number of cod currently swimming off Newfoundland and Labrador is probably only about 2% of the long-term average.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, Newfoundland/Labrador cod landings probably ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 metric tons, or roughly 220 million to 440 million pounds.  The study’s authors calculated that, if appropriate management measures to rebuild and conserve the stock had been put in place, landings near the higher end of that range could have been sustained over the long term.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, after landings began to spike in the 1960s, eventually reaching 810,000 metric tons (1.78 billion pounds) in 1968, much of it landed by fleets from foreign nations fishing off the Canadian coast, the stock began to decline rapidly.  In 1977, the Canadian government finally acted, and excluded foreign vessels from its exclusive economic zone.

Canada’s actions paralleled those taken a year earlier by the United States, when it passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, the first and largest step toward the U.S. law known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. 

The two nations continued to follow a similar path when both forced most foreign fishing boats out of their waters, but failed to adequately regulate their own fishing fleets.

In the United States, that failure led to domestic fishermen ramping up their cod fishing effort.  There were 825 boats fishing out of New England ports in 1977; by 1983, that number had increased to 1,423.  The additional boats were not only newer, but also larger and equipped with more modern fishing gear.  As a result, Georges Bank cod landings peaked at 53,000 tons (106 million pounds) peaked in 1982.  After that landings, and the cod stock, entered a sharp decline.

In Canada, the government saw cod as a way to boost the economy of Newfoundland, a place where, in the words of a Discover Magazine article, the people were

“poor, unemployed, and still living, some of them, in outports that could not be reached by road.  Past efforts to diversify the economy had more or less failed.”

Thus, the government sought to increase domestic cod landings, so that Newfoundlanders could catch the fish that were once taken by the foreign fleet.  Even though the spawning stock had decreased by 94% since the early 1960s as a result of the combined Canadian and foreign harvest, Canadian regulators decided that, with the foreign fleet gone, cod abundance would increase as well.  They were wrong, and by 1985 or so, the stock entered into a further decline. 

Biologists began to become aware of the problem but, instead of cutting back landings and rebuild the stock, the government was too invested in its plans to expand the fishery.  The cuts needed to recover the stock would have caused thousands of people to lose their jobs, at least in the short term.  The government, preferring the politically correct solution over the biologically correct one, did not heed the scientists’ advice, and only reduced quotas by a trivial amount.

As a result, scientists now estimate that in 1991, Newfoundland fishermen caught fully half of the adult cod then living off the Newfoundland coast.  No population of large fish can stand that level of removals, and so the next year, the Canadian government shut down the Newfoundland cod fishery.  In its effort to avoid imposing a harvest reduction that would cause short-term economic pain in the fishing industry, the government set itself on a path that would lead to a complete closure of the fishery, and put 30,000 Newfoundlanders out of work.

Today, the only cod fisheries that exist off Newfoundland are small-scale subsistence and recreational fisheries, fisheries used in scientific surveys, and what has been labeled a “small-scale commercial stewardship fishery.”  In combination, they land about 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cod each year, about 5% of the fishery’s potential long-term yield—if it had been properly managed.  And even that relatively modest amount is probably too great a harvest to allow the Newfoundland cod to rebuild.

Thus, a fishery that provided food to much of the Western world for over 400 years has all but disappeared, at first due to managers’ failure to recognize that it was in peril, and later due to government’s failure to elevate the biological needs of the stock over the political preferences of the bureaucrats in charge of the fishery.

Had conservation measures been adopted in the late 1970s, when the foreign fleet was kicked out, that would have prevented the growth of domestic landings, Newfoundland could have had a vital and economically important commercial cod fishery today.

Instead, only the bitter dregs of a once-great fishery remain.  And even so, landings remain to high to allow the fishery to rebound, even if that can only happen at some remote time in the future.

While scant time remains, will New England take heed of what Newfoundland teaches.

Or will it blindly take the same road?