Making Waves II

Making Waves II

I couldn’t keep my promise to blog again on this topic on Saturday. But that has given me a little more time to reflect on Wednesday evenings event.

I pointed out in the meeting that Ryan’s first four points dealt mainly with failed parliamentary and bureaucratic strategies to deal with a crisis whose beginningpre-dated the moratorium. Only the fifth, replacing NAFO, seemd to point forward to a new, future action, although in itself it might not produce immediate results.

The way NAFO is set up now, it does nothing to protect current fish stocks, nor provide hope that a sustainable fishery can be developed for the North Atlantic. Meetings are held at regular intervals to set quotas for the various stocks, but member countries are free to ignore the quotas and set their own targets.

Replacing NAFO does not seem to offer a solution, since there is no incentive for any country to change its current practice. I repeated a startegy that has been proposed in the past, namely that the fishermen needed to take matters into their own hands, and follow the example of the Icelandic fishermen, who, when faced with a similar situation concerning their cod stocks, armed their boats with giant scissors and cut the trawl lines of the (mainly) British fishermen who were then not respecting even the three-mile limit.

I was quickly put in my place by two speakers: one pointed out that the Icelandic fishers’ actions were backed by their government; the other said that such an action put all the onus on NL fishers. Both were right.

But their comments highlight the problems that can be placed at the door of the provincial and federal governments.  Our provincial government is doing almost nothing to help the situation in rural Newfoundland (it affects the island portion of the province primarily) when it allows unprocessed fish to be shipped abroad for processing, thereby exporting much-needed jobs.  And by linking fish quotas to pants rather than communities, it hands over one of the most powerful levers in the industry to private, profit-driven companies.

At the same time, the federal government is doing nothing to protect our fishing industry in international relations. When the 200-mile limit was set up, the agreement of Russia (and other Eastern Bloc coutries) was secured by handing over a substantial quota of cod withing that limit. Similar “make-weight” agreements have also been made in trade deals that initially had nothing to do with fish. And the Canadian government has done nothing to secure the 200-mile limit. We don’t send out warships. We send out private planes to observe foreign fishing fleets, but infringements are never pursued.

I’ll have more to say in future posts.