|
For decades, the fishing grounds of the North
Atlantic Ocean have been subject to extensive and expensive institutional
and governmental research and management by some of the most developed
industrial countries. Notwithstanding, this is the area where world's
greatest washout of fisheries management repeatedly occurs. Nowadays,
in the NE Atlantic, another disaster is looming, if not already there. All
this, in spite the greatest concentrations of fishery scientists and
the best-equipped research, management, and enforcement systems found at
both sides of the ocean, and in spite of the fact that the EC fishery
management has had ten years to learn the lessons of the cod fishery
collapses that occurred on North American and adjacent, international
fishing grounds. Every common sense observer must assume that there is
something basically wrong in the prevailing fishery management systems and
in the politicians’, managers’ and their scientific advisors’ way of
thinking and performing.
Some 10 years ago, the government of
Canada issued a moratorium banning fishing of cod, because of the
deterioration of both catches and standing stock. The once mighty cod
fisheries of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia collapsed, and 20,000 people lost
their source of income. The whole debacle is well documented, and its
consequences described in hundreds of articles and several books. And the
cod is not yet back. Now, a decade later, nobody seems to know whether all
this happened due to overfishing, or due also to some unspecified changes
in environmental conditions. Whatever be the case, mismanagement was
evident, because management was aplenty – it just misfired. |
