May 3, 2013 — Today is a day of reckoning for America’s first fishery. For too long, managers—including the industry members who sit on the fishery-management council—put off doing the right thing and set catch limits that made it difficult for fish populations to rebuild. While the latest cuts will inflict substantial pain on fishermen and their communities, they represent the best chance for this fishery’s future.
On May 1, 2013, New England’s groundfishermen began operating under a harsh new set of catch limits that will curtail fishing effort and inflict massive economic pain on an industry that’s already struggling to remain afloat. As fishermen come to grips with their new regulations, and regulators fret about the impact that their unpopular decisions will have on one of America’s most historic industries, we should take a moment to consider the fate of a similar fishery just a few hundred miles northwest.
In 1992 the Canadian government shocked the Newfoundland fishing industry with an announcement that it was imposing a moratorium on cod fishing. The decision incensed the fishing population: 20,000 people lost their jobs overnight. John Crosbie, then-minister of fisheries and oceans, was cornered by a mob of fishermen and infamously proclaimed, “There’s no need to abuse me. I didn’t take the fish from the goddamn water.” Crosbie later called the decision to shut down the fishery the hardest one he ever had to make as minister.
Newfoundland’s moratorium on cod fishing was initially intended to last just two years. But more than 20 years later, the commercial fishery is still closed. It wasn’t until July 2012 that scientists even began to see the first glimmer of hope for a recovery of the depleted cod populations that were once so robust they drew Europeans across the Atlantic centuries before Christopher Columbus ever set foot in the “New World.”
In 1991, just one year before the Newfoundland closure, New England fishermen set an annual record, landing nearly 18,000 metric tons of cod from the Gulf of Maine. For the 2012 fishing year that ended earlier this week, the total catch was approximately 2,300 metric tons—not even two-thirds of the amount the new regulations would have allowed fishermen to harvest. The trend is clear: Gulf of Maine cod populations are dangerously depleted.
There’s no concrete evidence yet that New England’s groundfishery faces the same fate as Newfoundland’s groundfishery, but there’s no reason to think it won’t. Some conservation groups have called for a shutdown of New England’s cod fishery similar to the one in Newfoundland two decades ago. To date, regulators have rejected those calls, but they were legally required to implement new restrictions for the 2013 fishing year that began on May 1. The new catch limit for the once-bountiful Gulf of Maine cod is 814 metric tons—less than 5 percent of the peak harvest level of 17,700 metric tons in 1991 and just 22 percent of last year’s quota, which was set at about 3,700 metric tons.
Back in January, at a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council, John Bullard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s top official in the northeast region, told the assembled crowd that a “day of reckoning” was coming to America’s oldest fishery. New science had shown that the populations of several fish species were in far worse shape than previously thought, and under the law that meant 2013 would be the first year catch limits would have to reflect this new reality.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress