Twenty years after the collapse of the world’s largest cod fishery off Canada’s East Coast, experts say the beleaguered groundfish are still being overexploited.
Fishing continues in areas where cod stocks are below “critical limits,” says Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University and head of a national science panel that called Thursday for sweeping changes in the management of Canada’s oceans.
The change needs to start at the top, by reducing the “czar-like” powers of the federal minister of fisheries and oceans, the panel says.
The Fisheries Act, which dates back to 1868, also needs to get with the modern age, says the expert panel on marine biodiversity, which was established by the Royal Society of Canada.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is responsible for both exploiting and conserving fisheries a “conflict of interest” that the panel says needs to be resolved.
The 10-member panel spent two years assessing ocean biodiversity and the challenges posed by climate change, fishing and aquaculture.
It has delivered a 316-page report that says Canada’s oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, which could make some waters inhospitable to marine life. And sea ice disappearing from the Arctic and the East Coast will profoundly affect marine life and their ecosystems.
It says overfishing has seriously depleted many species and disrupted marine food webs.
In the Gulf of St. Lawrence predatory-prey interactions have changed and “Now we find cod and some other species in a position where they are headed for extirpation,” Hutchings told a media briefing.
The report estimates that fish in Canada’s oceans declined in abundance by an average of 52 per cent from 1970 to the mid-1990s and “most commercially fished stocks remain well below conservation target levels. ”
Catches are about half those of the late 1980s with the landed value of all fisheries in 2009 almost the lowest since 1977, it says.
The panel says oceans stewardship and biodiversity conservation need to be made a “top government priority.”
It notes that government officials like to say Canada is a world leader in oceans and marine management, but the panel says the rhetoric does not square with reality.
“We made promises, and we haven’t kept them, ” says Hutchings.
The government has committed to creating a network of marine protected areas to cover 10 per cent of Canada’s ocean “real estate” by 2020.
So far, marine protected areas encompass less than one per cent of Canada’s ocean area, the panel says. And in 160 of the 161 protected areas off the B.C. coast, fishing is still allowed.
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