Cod — Building the Fishery of the Future
The Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation will be holding a conference on the theme Cod —Building the Fishery of the Future at the Quality Hotel and Suites in Gander on November 22 and 23, 2017.
We are holding the conference to provide people who expect to be part of the future cod industry with information they will need to prepare for it.
In this column, I don’t usually talk much about the work we do at CCFI. My purpose is more to challenge the industry to think about what we do ...
25 Years After the Moratorium
July 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the moratorium on fishing Northern cod off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, in NAFO Divisions 2J3KL.
It is worth noting that 1992 was just 15 years after Canada obtained a 200-mile exclusive economic zone, with widespread expectations that we could increase our fish catches substantially but resources would still increase in abundance over time, due to good Canadian management.
However, the 1992 moratorium was ...
Serving Customers
In the fishery in Atlantic Canada, there is a widespread belief among harvesters that they are the most important people in the seafood value chain, because they catch fish for others to process and eat.
Without them, there would be no fish.
Although there is a certain logic to it, that view of the world is completely upside down. In any value chain — seafood or other — the most important person is the one at the end of the chain — the consumer — who buys the product, pays for it, ...
Shaping the World We Live in
The beginning of a new year seems to be a good time to think about what the future will bring.
Little did we think at the beginning of 2016 that now, just a year later, Donald Trump would be President of the United States, Britain would vote to leave the European Union, or the very existence of the EU would be under threat just as Canada is about to finalize a free-trade agreement with it. Life seems to be full of surprises.
But should they really be surprises? Over Christmas, I read a ...
Learning from 40 Years with the 200-Mile Limit – Part II
Last month’s column dealt mainly with how Canada obtained the 200-mile limit in 1977, leading to great optimism about the future of the fishery in Atlantic Canada, but things did not turn out as expected.
Starting in 1992, just 15 years later, we imposed a series of moratoriums on fishing groundfish stocks to try to conserve what was left of those resources.
However, things were not going well even before the moratoriums. In 1981, there was a Royal Commission to investigate problems in ...
Learning from 40 Years with the 200-Mile Limit – Part I
As we approach 2017, we are also coming to the end of 40 years since Canada’s 200-mile limit came into effect in 1977.
Overall, it has been a tumultuous — and costly — 40 years, as we oscillated between tremendous opportunity and unmitigated disaster.
Forty years ago, we thought the 200-mile limit offered a huge opportunity. But the following 15 years brought little but trouble, culminating in a series of moratoriums on fishing the groundfish stocks that had been the industry’s ...
Creating New Competitive Advantages
Last month, I demonstrated that the competitive advantages that have sustained the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada for a long time are no longer advantages for us.
Our once-abundant resources are no longer as abundant as they were, and others we compete with have similar resources in greater abundance. Because of free-trade agreements and globalization of supply chains, we have access to good markets on favourable terms — but others have access to the same markets on similar terms, so ...
Key Performance Indicators
Most businesses use a few key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess how well they are doing in meeting important objectives.
In previous columns, I have discussed the fact that we have a serious productivity problem in the capture fishery in Atlantic Canada. Productivity is a good example of a key performance indicator, but there are others.
For example, an important KPI for the Icelandic fishing industry is output value per kilogram of catch. The industry in Iceland selected it as a ...
Brexit, Trump, Future Shock and the Fishing Industry
This column will be unlike any other I have written or probably will ever write for The Navigator magazine.
But recent events represent a significant departure from those of the past few decades and I think it is worthwhile to reflect on how they relate to the fishery.
On June 23, citizens of the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union. As I write this, Donald Trump has emerged as the presumptive Republican candidate for President of the United States. And through most of ...
Solving Problems
Our industry has many problems: a resource regime shift driven by global warming, a diminishing supply of labour, changing and increasingly expensive technologies and weak competitiveness, to name some of the more significant ones.
However, the truth is the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada has had serious problems of one kind or another pretty much from its very beginning.
The industry’s problems have been studied time and again for decades by different people and reports of the ...
