A global perspective and proof that perseverance pays off were brought to the stage at the Nova Scotia Fisheries and Aquaculture Ministers Conference in Halifax on Feb. 22 by Steinar Engeset, President of Dartmouth-based Newfound Trading Ltd. and Dr. Øystein Lie, founder and chief scientific officer of GenoMar, Norway, the world’s leading tilapia breeding company.
Engeset, who comes from a long line of Norwegian fishers, could be described as a founding father of the North Atlantic shrimp fishery and an innovator of fishing equipment that has become a standard today on larger fishing vessels.
“When you recognize a problem, you have opportunity,” said Engeset. “Never be afraid of a problem. Maybe you can do something about it.”
Engeset was instrumental in bringing the Nordmore grate technology to Canada from Norway, as well as in the development of the automatic trawl system. Both came about as a result of problems that turned into opportunities.
“Today, no shrimp boat goes to sea without this grate so again we had a problem and we looked at what we could do.”
Learn and cooperate with Norway, Iceland and other countries to determine why and how they have succeeded, work with provincial and federal governments on research and development, meet quality requirements for world markets, which will generate highest prices and earnings and build new fleets and fishing vessels suitable for safety and quality of production, are the opportunities for the Canadian fishing industry, said Engeset.
“When we start to look at where are we in Canada, I’m looking (that) we have a problem,” said Engeset, citing overall landings for all species for 1990 to 2015 that have declined almost 50 per cent, from 1,624,792 metric tonnes to 835,746.
“We have two problems,” he said. “Everybody says there is less and less in the ocean. We have to start to look at what is happening in our 200-mile limit. What can we do? Remember if you have a problem you have to understand the problem.”
The other problem is how to “get more of out of our oceans to feed the world’s population?” said Engeset, suggesting it may be possible to “get back a lot of the species we are concerned about today because we don’t know if they are down as much as reported or if they’ve moved. Things change in the ocean.”
Taking an eco-friendly approach to fishing and tackling issues like plastics pollution are two ways to get a greater yield from the ocean, said Dr. Øystein Lie.
“The reality of the ocean resources, there are challenges but we can achieve a lot by working together. We have opportunity but need to do it right. If we do this right we can probably save much more from the ocean.”
Dr. Lie said industry needs to be looking at “the whole ecosystem, not just harvesting parts we have been overexploiting. The ecosystem is very delicate from micro-organisms to predators so its complicated. We need to know a lot more about it. Plastic pollution in the ocean, this is a real problem. We need to do something about it.”
