”I can bear witness to what may happen – because I saw it happen”, Canada’s former Minister of Fisheries Brian Tobin said recently at a Stockholm seminar on the future of the threatened Baltic Cod stocks. Tobin, who served on that post in 1993-96, took over in the aftermath of the total collapse of the cod stocks off the Canadian and northern U.S. East coasts and the subsequent 1992 fishing moratorium.
“The cod stocks in these waters were a key source for protein for centuries, the bread basket of the world – and in effect it’s gone. The fishing of cod has been stopped since 1992, but the stocks haven’t recovered. It didn’t help. They’re still smaller than they were 16 years ago”, he added.
According to Tobin, the annual cod catch off Newfoundland and Labrador had been around 250,000 tons for a century, “a good example of sustainable fishing”, when something happened in the 1950’s and the outtake rose dramatically. New techniques had been developed – “basically trawling”. A peak of 800,000 tons was reached in 1968, followed by an equally drastic decrease in catches; the outtake was back to 250,000 tons in a mere few years. Few saw the writing on the wall, however – or listened to warnings from an increasing number of scientists – and the only countermeasure taken was a 1972 pushing out of the limit for non-Canadian fishing vessels to 200 miles.
“But Canadian fishers then started developing the same new techniques inside the 200-mile line, and in the 1980’s the catches were up to 500,000 tons again – and those were Canadian fishers,” said Tobin.
Bell of warning
Meanwhile, Tobin who had been elected to the Parliament for a district in Newfoundland and Labrador in his early 20’s, and eventually served as an M.P. for 22 years, had started advocating a policy change, raising some serious doubts about the industry’s future.
“I was constantly referred to by the then Minister as ‘the young member who fights against the interests of his own constituency’. But as the matter of fact, it was particularly women in the fisheries who started coming to me and said: ‘we used to get fish to prepare who were this big – now we get fish that is this small. Something is very wrong here’.”
The moratorium on cod fishing, still in force, was implemented in 1972, and Brian Tobin became the responsible minister the year after, including “a bridge to pensions” and a government buy-out of fishermen’s equipment among the tools for handling the socio-economic consequences. A main goal was to reduce the number of fishermen considerably, and a means to that end was to raise the price for licenses dramatically, “professionalizing the industry”, Tobin explained.
Lesson learned?
A consequence of the implosion of cod stocks was an explosion of shrimp and crabs, which has now become the main catches for the remaining fisheries in that part of Canada. Asked at the seminar whether, in that respect, he thought a lesson had been learned from what happened to the cod, Tobin answered that “they’re hitting them (shrimp and crabs) harder than I think they should, but yes – to some extent I do think they’ve learned some lessons. The management is better, although not perfect. What’s interesting is that it’s the coastal communities that demand sustainable fishing. They’ve been through falling off the cliff. They know what can happen”.
“You’ve done a better job in the EU than Canada did, but you will have to push the politicians to really listen to the scientists. And you’ve got to have a CFP with integrity: when somebody blatantly breaks the rules, you really have to raise the flag”.
Asked for his message to those working for the preservation of the Baltic cod, Tobin said that he know very little about the Baltic, “but one thing I do know, is that you need rules, you need surveillance – and you need teeth”.
“I’ve seen for myself that if you don’t do anything, commercial fishing will go on until the last fish is pulled out”.