In Canada, Cod Remain Scarce Despite Ban
For more than 500 years, the black waters off this craggy coast of rust-colored hills and ice-bound coves teemed with a seemingly endless supply of cod, so much that it sparked wars, drew immigrants from far away, and gave rise to a thriving fishing industry and a way of life passed across generations.
But after years of overfishing, changing sea temperatures, and mismanagement, the olive-backed, spotted fish known as the northern cod virtually vanished. In the summer of 1992, as boat after boat returned to this windswept land with empty nets, Canadian officials did something once unthinkable: They banned fishing cod.
“It was devastating, like somebody just cut the legs right out from underneath me,” said Bernard Chafe, 57, who began fishing with his father on a skiff here when he was 8 years old. “It was the only thing I knew how to do.”
The ban has yet to be lifted, and 20 years later the cod have failed to rebound, despite predictions that the moratorium would revive the stock after a few years. Without the fish, a way of life here is ending - abandoned boats rot along the quay, fishermen have given up their licenses, and many of their children have chosen other vocations or moved, leaving local officials searching for ways to revive the aging community.
For cod fishermen in New England, who have resisted government-ordered cuts to their catch, it is a sobering spectacle, a lesson hard to understand, much less accept.
As the number of cod counted in the waters between Provincetown, Mass., and Port Clyde, Maine, has plummeted, scientists and policy makers fear that what happened in the frigid waters 1,500 miles northeast of Massachusetts may be occurring in the Gulf of Maine, potentially dealing a dire blow to a multimillion-dollar industry that helped fuel the birth of the United States and continues to support hundreds of fishermen.
Last fall, scientists who study New England’s most storied fish - a wooden “Sacred Cod” has hung in the State House for more than 200 years - found major errors in a federal analysis that three years before had shown the local cod stock was healthy and regenerating, after an earlier round of catch limits.
The most recent assessment estimates there were only 26 million pounds of adult cod in the Gulf of Maine in 2010, about 19 percent of what scientists say is necessary for a healthy population.
The parallels with the sudden disappearance of cod in Newfoundland were so frightening to J.J. Maguire, a fisheries biologist in Quebec City who advises the New England Fishery Management Council, that he urged his colleagues in a January e-mail to consider this an emergency alarm.
A few weeks later, the council, which oversees fishing issues in the region, voted to recommend that the US Commerce Department reduce the local cod catch for the coming fishing season by 4 million pounds, or 22 percent. Fishermen say such a cut could put many of them out of business, while environmentalists warn that it may be insufficient and risk triggering a collapse in the fishery, similar to what happened in Newfoundland.
A bipartisan New England congressional coalition recently sent a letter to Commerce Secretary John Bryson, warning against precipitous cuts that “would devastate the commercial flee