Very late and a bit tentatively, someone has finally done something drastic. In December the European Union and Norway, which jointly manage the North Sea, announced a 40 percent cut in the catch quota for cod, along with similar cuts for other endangered fish. And starting next week about a fifth of the North Sea–a swath stretching from Scotland to the Netherlands–will be closed to bottom trawling for 12 weeks, to give the bottom-dwelling cod a chance to spawn. Some fishing-industry spokesmen in Britain denounced the cuts as “savage” and “a disaster,” and that’s how they will no doubt feel to fishermen facing the economic consequences. But even more painful cuts will probably be needed to bring back the cod.
The North Sea is not the only region facing a fishing crisis, of course. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, 28 percent of the world’s fish stocks are overfished or already depleted. An additional 47 percent are being fished to the limit. In the early 1990s the huge cod stock on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland collapsed, forcing the Canadian government to close that fishery altogether; it still hasn’t reopened. That wasn’t enough, though, to scare the Europeans into action. “The North Sea is arguably the best-studied system,” says Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. “You have very good scientists, it’s ringed with marine labs–so the fact that you can’t control the fishing there is a very poor sign.”
In Europe, as elsewhere, the process of fisheries management only begins with science. It ends with politics. Each year a committee of scientists from the nations that ring the North Sea meet in Copenhagen to assess the status of each fish stock. The scientists deliver advice on how many fish should be caught in the following year–the Total Allowable Catch. The EU’s ultimate decisions, though–which then have to be negotiated with nonmember Norway–are made by council of fisheries ministers from the member states. Inevitably–though, listening to fishermen lately, you might not guess it–those politicians tend to put the short-term interests of their own fishing industry above the long-term demands of maintaining stocks. “The ultimate decisions are taken on political grounds to keep the industry alive,” says Sarah Jones of the World Wildlife Fund.
But science, too, contributes to the problem–because even very good scientists aren’t very good at counting the fish in the sea. The general state of North Sea cod has been clear enough. “Essentially, it’s been a downward trend for nearly 30 years,” says Robin Cook of the Fisheries Research Service Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, Scotland. But in any given year the data are not precise enough to command action. Since the political decision makers can’t know exactly where the cliff is–the point at which the stock collapses and cod become too scarce to be worth chasing–they can feel better about letting the crisis go unsolved.
As it happens, the scientific data for the North Sea have been especially unreliable in recent years. Scientists have two ways of counting fish. They do their own research surveys, returning each year to the same points to trawl with the same gear and see how many fish they get. But they also rely heavily on the much dodgier catch data supplied by commercial vessels. Basically they try to gauge the size of the stock from how hard fishermen are finding it to catch fish. If there are fewer fish in the sea, the assumption is, fishermen will need more time to catch a given amount.
That assumption proved badly wrong in Newfoundland, and it helped bring about the disaster there. Last year it proved badly wrong in the North Sea. The problem is “technology creep”: fishermen are always getting better at catching fish, by equipping their boats with better sonars or nets. “As the stock got smaller, the fishing vessels were able to target little patches of fish,” says Cook. That enabled them to maintain catch rates that suggested a much larger stock. The bias was particularly bad in the data from Scottish fishermen, who take about 30 percent of the cod catch in the North Sea.
When scientists became aware of the problem last year, they stopped using the Scottish data. Immediately they discovered that for the previous several years they had been overestimating the cod stock by 50 percent. Already in bad shape, the stock of spawning-age cod was now suddenly below 70,000 tons, a quarter of what it had been 30 years earlier–or as scientists put it when they met in Copenhagen last fall, “outside safe biological limits… in a region where the risk of stock collapse is high.”
As Newfoundland’s experience demonstrates, once you allow a cod stock to collapse, it doesn’t soon come back. In the North Sea, cod typically don’t spawn until the age of 4. At that rate the stock would take years, even decades, to replenish itself, at a huge economic cost. It could take longer still if, as some scientists believe, the warmer temperatures that have prevailed recently in the North Sea are making it harder for cold-loving cod to grow to adulthood.
The EU and Norway’s emergency response–closing 40,000 square miles of the North Sea for 12 weeks–sounds disastrous to some fishermen (though some also sympathize with the need for such action). From the scientific point of view, says John Casey of the British Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries lab in Lowestoft, the closure is “not big enough and not long enough.” Nor is cutting the catch limit by 40 percent to about 49,000 tons, painful as it is to the fishing industry, likely to bring the cod back. One reason is that fishermen who have reached their limit on cod often continue to catch cod as they fish for haddock or whiting–it’s just that instead of bringing those cod to port, they have to throw them over the side, dead. Catch limits encourage irrationalities like that. So far they have demonstrably failed in the North Sea.
The scientific advice out of Copenhagen last November was, essentially, to close the whole North Sea to cod fishing. It may happen yet, unless European governments can attack the root of the problem: too many boats chasing too few fish. The EU and its member governments already spend about ¤400 million a year on reducing fishing capacity–mostly buying old boats from fishermen and demolishing them. But they also spend ¤160 million a year subsidizing the purchase of new boats or the renovation of old ones. There is a contradiction there. “The time for business as usual is over,” EU Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler said in Brussels last September. “We have made totally inadequate progress in the last 10 years in bringing capacity and fishing effort into line with resources.”
The current crisis seems to have induced a mood of resolution in Brussels. But in Peterhead, Scotland, the largest whitefish port in Europe, the mood last week was grim. Along the once prosperous fish docks, men descended from generations of fishers talked of not taking their sons to sea, for fear they would get hooked on a career without a future. “I’m making less money than I was 17 years ago, when I was just a boy of 16,” said one boat captain, Stan Morgan. Morgan had been struggling to make his boat payments even before the new limits. Many of his peers have already failed.
Peterhead is building a new fish market on the dockside, a sign of hope for the future–but in the old market the halls are half empty. Only 315 boats land their fish in Peterhead now, down from 450 just five years ago. Lossiemouth up the coast used to have 90 boats, but now there are none, and shops are boarded up. “We all want to conserve the fish, but they’re putting us out of business,” said another Peterhead fisherman.
The sad thing is, that’s exactly what needs to happen if the North Sea cod fishery is to survive at all. Everybody knows that now, or should.
