As you may or may not be aware, the United Nations has named 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022).
IYAFA 2022 is aimed at highlighting how small-scale artisanal fishers, fish farmers and fish workers contribute to human well-being, healthy agri-food systems and poverty eradication through the responsible and sustainable use of fisheries and aquaculture resources.
A recent Food and Agriculture Organization WorldFish study indicated that the small-scale sector may account for the bulk of production, considering that about 80 per cent of the world’s aquaculture production comes from developing countries, with the number of artisanal farmers being much higher than those employed at farm level in medium and large-scale aquaculture.
In fact, related to this, on June 20–22 of this year, St. John’s, N.L., will be hosting the 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress North America (4WSFC).
According to the organizers, “the congress aims to discuss bold prospects and innovative ideas and strategies needed to address pressing issues for North America’s small-scale fisheries and fisheries and ocean sustainability, set within the context of a changing ocean, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, among other challenges.”
In the shadow of this increased focus on small-scale fisheries, it is more than ironic that 2022 also marks the 30th anniversary of one of the darkest days in Canadian fishing industry history — the July 1992 cod moratorium. As everyone is well aware, the controversial moratorium essentially put about 30,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians out of work and changed the face and complexion of the fishery in Eastern Canada forever.
Since the closure of what was once one of the largest fisheries in the world, there have been countless studies and reports penned into the root causes of the circumstances leading to the shutdown of this groundfish fishery — and even more finger pointing.
Now, a new study is suggesting that if Canadian authorities had allowed for the rebuilding of the northern Atlantic cod stock off Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1980s, annual catches of about 200,000 tonnes could have been sustained.
The report by researchers from the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research and Dalhousie University modeled the cod population trajectory for the entire period from 1508 to 2019.
“Our assessment suggests that the biomass — the weight of the population in the water — of Northern cod is currently around two per cent of what it was earlier,” said Rebecca Schijns, lead author of the study and a researcher with the Sea Around Us at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.
“The interesting thing is that we got to these results by applying a computer-intensive, but very simple stock assessment method — known as CMSY (catch maximum sustainable yield) — to catch data for five centuries. Different from previous assessments that required large amounts of information, this method basically requires only a time series of annual catches,” Schijns said. “The other information that is required is available from the scientific literature and from people with knowledge of the fishery.”
Working with such a long time series allowed the researchers to reliably estimate maximum sustainable yield — or the highest catch that a fish stock can support in the long-term, given that environmental conditions remain more or less constant — for Northern cod at 380,000 tonnes per year.
However, as everyone knows, such high catches are now only a dream — at least for now.
The researchers explained that small-scale fishermen used lines and later cod traps for about 400 years and were sustainable, generating catches of 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes per year. However, in the mid-1950s, the introduction of bottom trawlers reduced Northern cod biomass to levels that could not sustain high catches.
Although Canada declared a fishery exclusion zone in 1977, fishing did not actually halt to allow the stock to rebuild, leading to a final collapse of the northern Atlantic cod fishery in 1992.
The study stated that in recent years, every time Northern cod populations appear to increase, the fishing quota is raised.
“As a student, I was on board a German trawler fishing off Newfoundland and Labrador in 1973 and I have vivid memories of this cod rush,” said Dr. Daniel Pauly, co-author of the study and the Sea Around Us principal investigator.
“If artisanal fishers in the outports had been listened to when they warned about running out of cod to catch, things would be different now,” Pauly said.
“The scientists then monitoring the cod stock ignored small-scale fishers and relied only on the data from trawlers which, however, did not reflect the cod stock’s decline because the trawlers could follow the cod further out than the small-scale fishers.”
This researcher went on to say that if regulators at the time had given any heed to what local and/or Indigenous fishers had to say, while integrating centuries-old catch data into stock assessments, it certainly would have helped manage marine populations more effectively for the long term. Sound familiar?
Many believe that this approach is also helpful to understand the total impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems.
“The CMSY method proved to be useful to assess the data-rich cod stock, but it also works with stocks for which we have only catch data. This method is able to provide more reliable estimates of stock status by incorporating past data-limited periods,” Pauly explained.
Could this new approach be a new, innovative tool in the toolbox of both fisheries scientists and managers in offering policymakers the possibility of taking a comprehensive look into the status of the world’s remaining important fish stocks? All information is valuable.
While many will be looking back this year at what occurred 30 years ago, it is also important to look ahead 30 years as well. While we can lament about the mistakes of the past, it is even more important to use all available input, research and data to design policies that prevent collapses similar to that of the cod stock and protect it and other valuable species for the generations to come.
