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CURRENT ISSUE VOLUME 19 NO. 4 JULY/AUGUST 2008
 Forum
Newfoundland & Labrador's Fisheries Conundrum
By Roland Card
The ground-fish industry, a primary engine of Newfoundland and Labrador's economy since Europeans began settling here, has been destroyed due to poor management of the resource. Fifteen years after a fishery moratorium was declared in 1992, the cod stocks still have not recovered enough to support a sustained commercial fishery.
Except for the fishery, most of our coastal communities have no locally based economic activity to support them. The compelling realities are that hundreds of communities along our coast were built because of, and depend on, the fishery in one-way or another for their existence. An all out effort to ensure the ground-fish stocks were given the best possible chance to recover should have been undertaken immediately following 1992. Instead the federal government while spending billions on initiatives like retraining programs for jobs that didn't exist, actually reduced its spending on DFO scientific research, surveillance and management programs in the Newfoundland region. Under federal DFO management, the growing seal herds have destroyed millions of cod and the foreign fishing fleets continue to rape the nose and tail of the Grand Banks to this day.
Policy areas that must be addressed more thoroughly than they have been up to now by both levels of government and the industry are: resource management, research programs, technology issues, quality programs, processing capacity and management, marketing issues and federal-provincial jurisdiction.
Implementation of programs designed to rebuild fish stocks (ground-fish in particular) is the only plausible approach to solving the problems within the fishing industry. Other than implementation of the 1992 moratorium, absolutely no attempt has been made to do this.
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