The Grand Banks of Newfoundland are a series of underwater plateaus found off the northeast coast of Canada. For centuries the Grand Banks produced a seemingly endless supply of cod and other commercially valuable fish. However, overfishing and mismanagement of stocks in the second half of the twentieth century saw the number of cod dwindle and then ultimately collapse, causing economic turmoil and significant social issues for the people of Newfoundland who had come to rely on cod fishing as a major part of their economy. As Charles Clover writes in The End of the Line:
“The Grand Banks is the textbook case of failure in fisheries science. An army of scientists in one of the world’s richest and most advanced nations managed to destroy one of the richest fisheries in the world while convincing themselves for a decade that they were doing no such thing. The Newfoundland cod collapse was the nightmare that shook the world out of its complacent assumption that the sea’s resources were renewable and being managed in an enlightened manner” (1).
The Discovery of the Grand Banks
Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto (known in the English speaking world as John Cabot) travelled from Bristol, England to Newfoundland in 1497, landing at Bonavista Bay. He is said to have remarked that the waters of the Grand Banks were so full of cod that it was possible to catch them by lowering a weighted basket into the water and retrieving it quickly. English fishermen who sailed to Newfoundland in the 1600s described the shoals of Grand Banks cod as being “so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them (2).”
The Grand Banks were so productive because of their location. The warm Gulf Stream mixed with the cool Labrador Current creating unique currents and tidal patterns. These conditions combined with the relatively shallow waters of the Grand Banks (the depth rarely exceeding one hundred metres) allowing sunlight to reach the seabed, stimulating the growth of marine vegetation which provided a home for small fish, shellfish and other marine creatures.
In turn, these creatures attracted larger fish which came to feed on them. Swordfish, capelin, haddock, American plaice, yellowtail flounder and lobster and crab were all found in huge numbers across the Grand Banks, but it was cod which were found in the greatest numbers of all.
Early Fishing of the Grand Banks
From the seventeenth century until the turn of the twentieth century, the Grand Banks were fished using sail-powered vessels. French, Spanish and Portuguese fishing vessels travelled to the Grand Banks in the 1700s, with the latter two nations collectively taking around 30,000 tons of cod from Canadian waters each year (4). Cod would be caught by baited lines which were dropped from the sides of boats, with the cod being preserved by being salted from the long journey back to Europe. American and Canadian fishermen would use schooners – fast sail-powered boats – which would travel to the Grand Banks and act as a mothership for smaller one or two-man boats known as dories (3). The dories would fish for cod using strings of baited hooks lowered to the seabed on a handline, and then return to the schooner to unload their catch. Fishing the Grand Banks in wooden, sail-powered vessels was dangerous. Due to the unique climatic conditions of the Grand Banks fog could set in fast, making collisions between vessels or becoming lost at sea a constant hazard. Furthermore, fishing from the small dories was highly dangerous, as they could easily become swamped with water and capsized if the weather suddenly changed, especially if they were fully laden with fish (3).
The Grand Banks were fished by sail-powered vessels for hundreds of years, and the limitations of these types of vessels, along with the hook-and-line fishing methods they employed meant that fish stocks were fished sustainably. Every year the populations of cod and other species were able to spawn to their maximum extent and replace the fish which had been caught. This began to change in the last few years of the 1800s when the first steam-powered trawlers vessels began to appear on the Grand Banks.
From Sail Power to Steam Power
By the 1920s the fleets of Canadian and American sailing fishing boats had almost completely been replaced by steam-powered trawlers. These vessels were much more efficient than the sail-powered boats, able to stay out at sea much longer and catch many more fish. They also caused much more damage to the marine environment as, rather than using hook-and-lines which were dropped down from the boat to the seabed, they used trawl nets which were constantly dragged over the seabed. Steam-powered fishing saw catches increase significantly, and fishing become an even more important part of the economy of the Grand Banks.
In the 1950s diesel-engined vessels which were even more powerful and efficient than steam-powered boats began to appear on the Grand Banks. By the 1960s, diesel power had allowed the factory trawler to be developed. These were huge vessels equipped with radio navigation aids and electronic fish finding technology which could also process and freeze their catch on board, meaning they could stay at sea for many weeks at a time and catch hundreds of tons of fish before they needed to return to port. Factory trawlers from Britain and the Soviet Union began to appear on the Grand Banks in the mid-1960s, followed by others from Spain, Romania, France and West Germany (4).
During this time the Canadian and American governments only controlled the waters to three nautical miles from their coastline meaning that there were no restrictions to foreign trawlers fishing the Grand Banks. The number of fish caught soared, with 810,000 tons being caught in 1968 (5). This level and intensity of fishing was unsustainable and catches soon began to fall away as the cod could not reproduce fast enough to replace the fish which were being caught. By 1975 the annual catch had decreased to 300,000 tons (5). In the two centuries of the 1600s and 1700s, an estimated eight million tons of cod were taken from the grand banks. In the fifteen years between 1960 and 1975 factory trawlers took the same amount. Newfoundland resident Wilson Hayward spoke to the BBC in 2002 about commercial fishing in the Grand Banks during this time. The then 76-year-old described the rush of foreign trawlers that came to the area: “I remember going out onto the cape in the night, and all you could see were dragger [trawler] lights as far as the eye could see, just like a city in the sea. We all knew it was wrong. They were taking the mother fish which had been out there spawning over the years” (6).
Foreign Fleets Expelled
In 1976 the Canadian and US governments took action to reclaim waters along the eastern coastline of North America. New international laws gave all nations the right to extend their exclusive economic zone – the area of sea only they can exploit to 200 nautical miles from their coastline. This was implemented in 1977 and the foreign trawlers were expelled from the Grand Banks and Canadian waters. This was to be a major turning point in the fate of the Grand Banks. Having gained control of their waters, the Canadian government and fishing industry now had the chance to fish the Grand Banks sustainably and restore the reduced, but still hugely productive fishery, back to its former size. But this was a chance which was not taken. As Mark Kurlansky writes in his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World: “The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else, as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries … Canada was investing in a Grand Banks fleet” (3).
The Canadian government and fishing industry was determined to make the most of the Grand Banks cod fishery which they now controlled and cheap government-backed loans were made available to allow new fishing companies to be established and existing fishermen to expand their businesses. In the book The Unnatural History of the Sea, Callum Roberts writes that once the 200-mile limit was established:
“Both Canada and the United States [which controlled a small portion of the Grand Banks] expected a bonanza from the exclusion of foreign boats and poured money into new fishing vessels to cash in. Between 1977 and 1982, the New England trawl fishing fleet nearly doubled in size from 825 to over 1,400 boats. In 1975, the Canadian east coast fishing industry employed fourteen thousand people; by 1980 there were thirty-three thousand. Hence domestic overfishing replaced foreign overfishing (4).”
Professor George Rose of Newfoundland Memorial University spoke to the BBC in 2002 about the race for Canadians to profit from the extension of the EEZ to 200 miles: “There was a euphoria – the provincial government thought we’d hit the jackpot. So things just took off – boats were built [and] plants were commissioned (6).”
Canadian Overfishing of the Grand Banks
For the first few years the Grand Banks continued to produce huge amounts of fish, solidifying fishing and fish processing as a cornerstone of Newfoundland’s economy. Hundreds of thousands of tons of cod were caught each year and Canadian companies such as Fishery Products International and National Sea Products expanded with the help of generous government funding (3). The first signs of trouble came in the early 1980s when inshore fishermen reported a decline in their cod catches. They theorised that the offshore factory trawlers were catching the majority of the cod before they had a chance to migrate to shallower inshore waters and spawn (3). The Canadian government ignored the concerns of inshore fishermen as all of the investment had been made in the offshore fleet and this was continuing to generate significant profit through continued high catches of cod. Indeed, a report by the Canadian Task Force on Atlantic Fisheries headed by Senator Michael Kirby primarily looked at finding new international markets for the cod which would be caught on the Grand Banks in the coming years (3).
The optimism of the Canadian government was based on flawed scientific data. Canadian fisheries scientists believed that they were catching around 16 per cent of the total number of Grand Banks cod every year, but this figure was wildly inaccurate and they were in fact catching around 60 per cent (1). Predictions that catches would rise to 400,000 tons by 1990 proved catastrophically wrong, and by 1987 only 266,000 tons were being caught. By this point scientists were warning that Grand Banks cod stocks were in real trouble and advised limiting catches to 125,000 tons for 1988, but, fearful of the anger this would cause in the Newfoundland fishing industry the quota was instead set at 235,000 tons.
Many proponents of Canada’s fishing industry pointed to these high catches as evidence that Grand Banks cod stocks were still healthy, but the reality was that catches could only be maintained at these levels as modern trawlers with electronic fish-finding technology were able to systematically locate and then catch the populations of cod which remained. Eventually, even the Canadian government and fishing industry had to accept that Grand Banks cod stocks were in terminal decline the government was forced to act. A moratorium on cod fishing was announced in 1992 and extended indefinitely in 1994.
Impact of the Moratorium
The moratorium meant that there was a total ban on commercial fishing for cod across the Grand Banks and many other areas of eastern Canada had commercial cod fishing either banned or severely limited. The effects on the local economy were devastating. An estimated 30,000 fishermen lost their jobs in and around the Newfoundland area, while a further 15,000 people working in related industries such as shipbuilding, fish processing and the marketing and selling of fish also found themselves out of work.
Fish processing plants shut down, trawlers were dismantled or sold to other countries at reduced prices, and as people left the communities to find work elsewhere and other businesses such as cafes, shops, hotels and guesthouses which had relied on trade from fishing industry employees found that they were no longer making enough money to stay open. Around 46,000 people were thought to have left the province to seek work elsewhere following the collapse of the Grand Banks cod stocks. Unemployment benefits and other forms of financial support given to out or work fishing industry employees have been calculated at around one billion dollars (7).
Some who remained continued to try and make a living from fishing. The larger fish processing plants were able to continue with a much-reduced workforce, processing cod which had been imported from Russia and Norway, while some fishermen tried to make a living by catching other species of fish, shellfish or crabs and lobsters. But, as Mark Kurlansky writes, “these were lesser forms of fishing. Most fishermen just collected the [unemployment] package” (3). Kurlansky goes on to say:
“Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct – so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s man scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all.” (3).
How Many Cod Have Been Lost?
Professor George Rose has attempted to calculate the decline of Grand Banks cod using a specially developed model which uses data from a wide range of sources to estimate past cod populations. He calculated that in the years immediately after John Cabot in 1505 there were around seven million tons of cod in the Grand Banks, consisting of billions of individual fish. By the time the Canadians implemented the moratorium in 1992 there were 22,000 tons of cod – around 0.3 per cent of the original population in the early 1500s (4).
Why Have the Cod Not Came Back?
Since the moratorium in the early 1990s attempts have been made to allow the Grand Banks cod stocks to recover, although there have been few signs of this succeeding. In 2002 it was reported that ten years after the moratorium was introduced there were still no signs that cod had returned in any meaningful numbers (6). In The Unnatural History of the Sea, Professor Callum Roberts explains that simply reducing fishing pressure is rarely enough for a fishery to recover, and the Grand Banks are “the most notorious example of [a] non-recovery”:
“All kinds of theories have been advanced to explain why cod did not rebound after the fishing moratorium was declared in 1992. Some argue that the conversion of capelin shoals into fishmeal because capelin are a staple food of cod. … On the other hand, some scientists point to the fact that capelin are predators of cod larvae, so too many capelin may hold back recovery. … Others, notably seal hunters, say there are too many harp seals and they are eating young cod. … Research studies suggest the mortality of the few juvenile cod around is extremely high, but nobody is sure why” (4).
He goes on to say that while there is a moratorium on cod fishing on the Grand Banks, other forms of fishing are still permitted meaning it is impossible to stop catching cod unless fishing is stopped altogether. Shellfish dredgers, shrimp and prawn trawlers and crab fishers all still operate across the Grand Banks. All of these forms of fishing will catch cod and disrupt the spawning patterns of the few cod which still populate the area. Roberts also says that intensive overfishing which took place on the Grand Banks has changed cod from a “force of nature to a mere fish” and “the structure of the ecosystem has shifted, and it is not clear whether the past can be created anew” (6).
By 2010, eighteen years after the moratorium was first implemented, Grand Banks cod had made a very limited recovery. Stocks increased by 69 per cent between 2007 and 2010, meaning the total number of Grand Banks cod was at around 10 per cent of 1960s levels (8).
The very modest increase in Grand Banks cod numbers led to calls from Newfoundland commercial fishermen to end the moratorium and allow cod fishing to be restarted. In the 2010s a small-scale ‘stewardship’ fishery for cod was established, with its quota set at 9,500 tons in 2018 and rising to 12,350 in 2019 and 2020. In 2021 the quota was set at 12,999 (9). Oceana Canada, the Canadian branch of Oceana, the world’s largest ocean conservation organisation, said that the quota should be no more than 5,000 tons. Keith Sullivan, a president of Labrador and Newfoundland’s Food Fish & Allied Workers Union which represents over 15,000 people strongly disagreed, saying that fishermen across the Grand Banks are “Seeing more cod now than they ever see seen in their entire lives … We want to rebuild our communities at the same time we rebuild the stock” (9). This is not a view shared by fisheries scientists, with a paper published in the International Journal of Society and Natural Resources that “recovery could take decades, even under an absolute fishing ban” (10). The paper also said that a recovery which generated more jobs under low-fishing conditions could be possible, but “high-fishing policies initially create more jobs, but eventually crash the resource” (10).
The situation in which Grand Banks cod stocks are now in is a familiar one. When a once productive fishery crashes and then undergoes a small recovery a process begins. The recovery, no matter how minor, leads to immense pressure to resume commercial fishing. When this fishing inevitably restarts the recovery is reversed and fish stocks are again reduced to critically low levels. This causes commercial fishing to once again cease and eventually another minor recovery will eventually take place. This, in turn, leads to calls for commercial fishing to resume and the process repeats itself, with the fishery caught in an endless trap of minor recoveries which end as soon as the commercial fishing restarts. This is exactly the situation that the Grand Banks are now in, with fishermen and conservationists fighting over cod quotas being set at 5,000 tons or just under 13,000 tons, when just decades earlier the fishery had produced upwards of 800,000 tons a year. As George Rose stated in 1997:
“I am not optimistic that we will ever let it come back to what it was. If we get [higher cod stocks] there will be unbelievable pressure to fish it . . . We found 15,000 cod in the South Bay, and everyone said the cod are back. Hold on! Ten years ago, the biomass of the population, was 1.2 million” (11).
Recent Legislation
With little sign of any meaningful Grand Banks cod recovery, further legislation was introduced with a 2019 amendment to Canada’s Fisheries Act which introduced changes to rebuild Grand Banks cod stocks. This amendment set out rules which stated that if a fish stock fell below a certain reference point Canada’s fisheries minister would need to step in and implement a plan to rebuild the stock and “removals by all human sources must be kept to the lowest possible level (12).”
While such changes could, in theory at least, see cod numbers increase if they were applied to the Grand Banks, fisheries scientists such as George Rose have criticised the plans. In a 2021 article, which he co-authored, said that the plan to keep fish removals by humans to the “lowest possible level” did not mean that this level would be zero, “or even close to it” (10). This was because the 2019 amendments were not legally binding and could be changed or modified at any time by Canada’s fisheries minister. This meant that cod could continue to be caught even when the total biomass was still at critically low levels, and Rose and his co-authors feared that, as the legislation took cod stocks in 2017 as the baseline (the year in which catches were at the highest since the 1992 moratorium) it could be the case that this level became the “new normal” around which the population permanently fluctuates (12).
The Future of the Grand Banks
Thirty years on from the initial moratorium, Grand Banks cod show little sign of returning to even a fraction of their 1960s levels, let alone that of the time of John Cabot in the late 1400s. With weak and ineffectual legislation being put in place, and Canadian politicians still seem keen to keep what remains of the Newfoundland fishing industry onside by allowing some commercial fishing to take place, a recovery of Grand Banks cod looks highly unlikely. Stuck in a perpetual sequence of minor recoveries followed by the resumption of fishing and stock crashes, the Grand Banks are now an example to the world of how one of the world’s largest and most productive fisheries can be reduced to a fraction of its former size through just a few decades of mismanagement.
References:
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- Clover, C. (2004,) The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat, Ebury Press.
- Geoffrey Lean on the Future of Fish, The Telegraph, 25/5/2011.
- Kurlansky, M. (1997), Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Vintage.
- Roberts, C. (2007), The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing, Gaia.
- Canadahistory.com, Cod Collapse, viewed on 28/5/2022.
- BBC News, Cod’s warning from Newfoundland, viewed on 30/5/2022.
- Rose, A. (2011) Who Killed the Grand Banks?: The Untold Story Behind the Decimation of One of the World’s Greatest Natural Resources, John Wiley & Sons.
- CBC.ca, Grand Banks Cod Stocks Grow 69% Since 2007, viewed on 26/5/2022.
- CBC.ca, After Almost 3 Decades, Cod are Still Not Back Off N.L. Scientists Worry it May Never Happen, viewed on 26/5/2022.
- Haedrich, R. L. and Hamilton, C. L. (2000) The Fall and Future of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery, Society & Natural Resources, 13:4, 359-372.
- Rose (1997) quoted in Asbury, S and Ball, R (2016) The Practical Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility, Routledge.
- Policy Options, The Flawed New Plan to Rebuild Canada’s Iconic Northern Cod, viewed on 17/5/2022.
Note: This article was originally uploaded to the site in 2012. It was rewritten in 2022.