Cod rebuilding plan late, inadequate, critic says
The federal government quietly released a northern cod stock rebuilding plan just before Christmas but an environmental charity executive says the strategy is lacking.
“The problem is that cod is considered endangered but it's still the largest groundfish fishery in Atlantic Canada, 12,000 tonnes right now,” said Susanna Fuller, vicepresident of operations and projects at Oceans North.
“We're still fishing an endangered species at a high level,” Fuller said. “We wouldn't do that with rhinoceroses or right whales.”
The Atlantic cod population along the Newfoundland and Labrador shelf is a bottom-dwelling species that grow to a half-metre long. The cod lives up to 15 years and the females, having reached the age of maturity at five years old, can produce between 300,000 and several million eggs in a single breeding season.
However, less than one egg of each million succeeds in completing the cycle to become a mature cod.
Peak landings of Atlantic cod reached more than 800,000 tonnes in the late 1960s, but the catch declined to 140,000 tonnes by the late 1970s.
A continued decline and a collapse in stock led to a cod moratorium in 1992 that has since evolved into a limited fishery.
“Everybody thinks that the cod fishery stopped but it's like a 12,000 tonne fishery, with another inshore recreation fishery of 10 fish per person that no one knows how much is being taken,” Fuller said.
In response to the cod collapse of nearly three decades ago, the federal Fisheries Department released its rebuilding plan just before Christmas, intentionally to avoid scrutiny, Fuller mused.
“The bigger public picture is that this is the biggest fisheries collapse in Canadian history,” Fuller said. “Twentynine years later the government is finally releasing a plan to actually recover it. That's too long. Something is better than nothing and now is better than never. “
But the plan is lacking, Fuller said.
“The key thing in the rebuilding plan is that there is what they call the biomass limit reference point, to which the stock is no longer in the critical zone. It is currently below that level, not anywhere near the limit reference point.”
Fuller said that limit reference point is set by the reasonably healthy stock levels of the late 1980s.
She said the cod stock biomass was almost a million tonnes in 1980.
“That's the reference point they are using,” Fuller said. “It's about 50 per cent of that right now.
“My problem with the rebuilding plan is that they don't have a timeline for when they want to reach this limit reference point and they are saying that when the stock is 75 per cent of the limit reference point or 25 per cent below the level that it would get out of the critical zone, they could increase the quota by 50 per cent.”
That means that when the stock reaches three-quarters of the 1980s level, below which fishing should be as limited as possible, the rule in the new rebuilding plan would allow for the quota to go up by 6,000 tonnes, she said.
“That goes against DFO'S own policy which says when a stock is in the critical zone, fishing should be kept to the lowest levels possible.”
The rebuilding plan articulates as its primary objective “to promote stock growth out of the critical zone … by ensuring removals from all fishing sources are kept to the lowest possible level until the stock has cleared the zone.”
The plan says the objective remains the same whether the stock is declining, stable or increasing.
Fuller said there is an ongoing argument that climate change and predatory seals, not overfishing, are to blame for the cod stock not recovering.
“It's the environment, we can't do anything about it, we might as well keep fishing,” she said, “which is a bad argument because there will be no fish.”
She said the major remaining question is if rebuilding the cod stock is actually the long-range goal.
“I don't think fishermen actually want to rebuild cod. Shrimp is far more valuable, Crab is far more valuable. If you have a big cod stock that's been eating on shrimp and crab biomass … you are not going to have those valuable fisheries which per pound are much more valuable.”
Fuller said that's the economic analysis, “but in our history of collapsing cod stock, is this rebuilding plan going to bring it back, we don't know because there is not a timeline but what we do know is that they are going to allow the quota to increase by 50 per cent before it (stock) reaches the biomass that existed in the 1980s.”