The EU Is Cracking Down On "Ruthless" Overfishing Of Cod, But Not Threatened Bluefin

BRUSSELS — Cod is slipping closer to disappearing from key European fishing grounds, officials warned Friday, saying that only steep catch cuts will prevent the disappearance of a species prized for centuries for its flaky white flesh.

The European Union's executive body called for sharp cuts in the amount of cod fisherman can catch next year – up to 25 percent in some areas. The European Commission said recent studies showed cod catches in some areas are far outstripping the rate of reproduction.

Scientists estimated that in the 1970s there were more than 250,000 tons of cod in fishing grounds in the North Sea, eastern English Channel and Scandinavia's Skagerrak strait. In recent years, however, stocks have dropped to 50,000 tons.

"We are not that far away from a situation of complete collapse," said Jose Rodriguez, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana. He and other environmentalists said pressure from the fishing industry had kept quotas at levels too high to sustain a viable populations around Europe, while lack of enforcement meant illegal fishing made the problem worse.

The European Commission said Friday it would seek in 2010 to cut the catch in some fishing grounds around Britain, France, Spain and much of Scandinavia from 5,700 tons to 4,250 tons.

In the Mediterranean, bluefin tuna has been overfished for years to satisfy increasing world demand for sushi and sashimi. The tuna population is now a fraction of what it was a few decades ago, but the EU's Mediterranean nations last month refused to impose even a temporary ban.

Oceana estimated that illegal fishing doubled the amount of tuna caught.

Meanwhile Cod, which once sustained vibrant fishing communities from Portugal to Britain to Canada, is increasingly consumed by the ton as salt cod and fish-and-chips.

Story continues below

"People don't ask for fish and chips, they ask for cod and chips," said Mike Guo, a manager at Great Fish and Chips in Essex, England. "It's a traditional dish."

The depletion of the species has caused the decay and disappearance of hundreds of fishing villages on both sides of the Atlantic.

Overfishing off Canada's maritime provinces exhausted the world's richest cod grounds and forced the government to impose a fishing moratorium. The collapse wiped out more than 42,000 jobs, and 18 years later the fish have still not returned.

"It was devastating," said Tom Hedderson, minister of fisheries in Newfoundland. "This affected whole communities ... all up and down the coast here in Newfoundland and Labrador."

He welcomed the EU call to cut catches by 25 percent, but suggested more drastic cuts may be needed.

Some Canadian scientists believe the collapse of cod stocks off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia changed the marine ecosystem so dramatically that it may be impossible for cod to recover. Off Newfoundland alone, cod stocks once exceeded more than 400,000 tons but now scale only 5,500 tons, Hedderson said.

There are signs of recovery of Atlantic cod off New England, however, after years of conservation efforts. And international regulators have reopened some areas off Canada for limited fishing, Canada's Fisheries and Oceans Department spokesman Scott Cantin said.

The fishing industry in Europe, however, is in decline. The number of vessels in the 15 nations that were part of the EU in 1995 has dropped from 104,000 then to 81,000 in 2006. In Britain, employment in the fishing sector sank from 21,600 in 1990 to 16,100 in 2006.

The EU Commission's demand for cod cuts will be discussed by the bloc's 27-member states in a Dec. 14-15 meeting, when the fishing quotas for 2010 will be finalized.

"The scientific prognosis for most stocks is not encouraging, with many in a worse state than last year," Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said Friday. "This, combined with the difficult economic climate, will mean that the negotiations will be even more challenging this time around."

Keeping fishermen in port with excessive quotas will add to their economic woes, said Bertie Armstrong of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation.

Norway and the EU jointly oversee cod stocks in North Sea, with each party regulating the stocks in its waters.

Norway and the EU will begin annual negotiations on cod stock management in November. Ann Kristin Westberg, deputy director-general of Norway's Fishery Ministry, said her country was unlikely to accept a 25 percent quota.

"We probably want to have it lower," she said. "We would like to point out that stock the EU are involved in managing are in terrible shape."

The cod harvest from the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine fishing grounds, the two primary New England fishing grounds, in 2007 totaled 3,868 metric tons, the biggest catch since 2003 but far under the landings of the 1980s when fishermen often caught more than 20,000 tons annually.

"The Gulf of Maine stock is responding to the recovery plan, and the Georges Bank stock is recovering but not as much," said Teri Frady of NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachussets.

___

Associated Press writers Clarke Canfield in Portland, Maine, Rob Gillies in Toronto, Karl Ritter in Stockholm and Rachel Leamon and Maresa Patience in London contributed to this report.

Comments

[brady61995]

the eu needs to crackdown on over eating. kill the demand and the supply will come back.

[anticapitalist1983]

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." -henry beston

http://www.all-creatures.org/quotes/beston_henry.html

have a nice day.

[jsarets]

Cod can be replaced in most recipes with tilapia, which can be farmed sustainably in closed-loop aquaculture or the emerging technique of aquaponics, where fish effluent is is filtered through hydroponic vegetable beds. Tilapia are vegetarians with feed conversion ratios of 1.1-1.2.

Another emerging species for sustainable aquaculture is arctic charr, in the salmon family. There has been some success at incorporating tilapia, chicken, and even soy into their feed, but most importantly, they thrive in cool water and don't require heated tanks in most parts of America.

And then there's the best farmed seafood of them all: mussels. A lean protein that delivers the flavor of the sea simply by suspending them from rafts on ropes into open water to filter feed. If they can keep the ducks away, it works brilliantly, far better than naturally-raised mussels.

We can't depend on hunting wild fish any more than we can depend on hunting wild game or gathering wild berries. If we want to feed fish to our civilization, we need to farm them sustainably.

[memphis81]

People need to adopt a mainly plant-based diet to save so the world, in my opinion. The world's oceans could recover, there would be less pollution by closing all the mega farms, and people would be healthier, to boot!

[SangZe]

Cape Cod no longer has Cod, or Haddock. Despite the reports of a recovery, fishing is dead. Friends who once came here for sport fishing, now go elsewhere.

[Gasparilla]

Like everything else, the problem is that the whole planet is overpopulated. Far too many people chasing the same amount of dwindling resources, with more billions to come in the future. Around the world, the solution is birth control. In this country, it's reducing immigration back to the levels that prevailed for most of the 20th century. About 250 to 300 hundred thousand per year, instead of the level of over a million legal immigrants, plus about half a million illegal, that was the norm for about the last fifteen or so years.

We are looking at adding another 120 million people a year by 2050, which includes the higher birth rates of immigrants. Whether it's global warming, we seem to be entering a long term severe drought in the Southwest, and more people will worsen the problem. Of course, there are the people who declare that any talk of reducing immigration is ignorant racism, but the real ignorance is pretending we can grow by 30 million a decade and it will make no difference. And if you wish to set goals for reducing greenhouse gases, any projection that doesn't take that population increase into account is a fraud.

[Gasparilla]

That should be we are looking at adding another 120 million people by 2050, not that many per year.

[ResidualSelfImage]

I eat haddock once month and lobster once a week.

If people knew how polluted the shrimp they eat are they would probably not eat them.

Thanks BANNEDIN THEUSA

If I may post a link, this is a better description:

http://corporate-statesmen.com/images/Rolling_Ban.pdf

[mlaiuppa]

And what about the salmon? Is that the U.S.'s problem?

[BANNED IN THE USA]

There is only one way to restore the world's fisheries. It is called Rolling Ban.

Rolling Ban splits the world's fisheries into a small set and then, in turn, implements a complete fishing ban on each member of the set.

For example, there would be a 3 year ban in the North Atlantic, followed by a three year ban in the South Atlantic, etc. It is easily enforceable and would not result in less fish caught in the long term since restored fisheries could support higher catches.

If I may post a link, this is a better description:

http://corporate-statesmen.com/images/Rolling_Ban.pdf

hope it helps ...

[bluize]

very interesting, thanks.

[BANNED IN THE USA]

echo