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Fishery management Dr. K.N.I. Bell, MSc(Dalhousie), PhD(Memorial) BACK to cod&dfo&cosewic index page

why are "renewable" resources increasingly unrenewable?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

It's not only Cod. Worldwide, fisheries are mostly in dire straits: collapsed or nearly so (see R. A. Myers and D. Pauly web sites). (The world lost a great person in Ram Myers; he is well remembered.)

It's not only Cod, and indeed it's not only fisheries. The Columbia Shuttle accident is taken as a lesson by Brig-Gen Deal of the USAF; see his article that considers disastrous accidents from the Thresher to Bhopal to Chernobyl. In order to be reliable, organistions need to be responsive and communicative, and that applies not just to fisheries, but to all.

What happened to Cod does offer us an opportunity to learn and choose new management structures that have the ability to be responsive to the mandate of conservation and sustainability. We need new structures because what we have doesn't work. There is no point reinvesting in failure.

All parties are racing to get the last fish. It is there for the taking. All parties have powerful representatives -- whether it be their people with links to politicians and bureaucrats (within a country), or their governments (in fisheries where many countries participate).

The mix of conservation and resource management science with 'political realism' has not worked. We need a better way. To find that better way, we need to know well what did not work.

Fisheries are public resources. Even though some are trying to change that, by privatising the right to fish, ITQs (individual transferable quotas) do not stop the players from trying to get more than their fair share, i.e ITQs do not eliminate the motivation to cheat. Cheating is easy ... misdeclare the catch, high-grade (throw back the less profitable fish, kill 2-5 times as many fish as you actually bring home), misdeclare the location where the catch was caught ...

We haven't many options in this matter. We can continue as we have been doing, and have ever-smaller and ever-more-expensive fisheries, or we can take firm action and at least save what we haven't lost yet. Ideally we go for recovery and restoration, but nobody is yet even talking about that. They've given up. DFO recently cut funding for a cod research program, reputedly because they wanted to put the money into "more commercially valuable fisheries" (Telegram, Jul 09 2005, pA10, "Adding Insult to Injury").

Management and the Cod collapse

Of central concern is the question of how this impending calamity (during the time it was only impending) escaped the official notice of DFO, and was not forestalled by timely measures.
    That is, how the decision-making of DFO (which happens at administrative, not scientific, levels) did not take it into account.
    The path of policy decisions (TACs etc.), from the real things (fish numbers, size, growth, reproduction, catches) that are measured to the decisions by Ministers, is long and tortuous (graphic from Cod Status Report).
    Were the administrative levels insulated from the science? Did they understand the science? Did they make adequate efforts to understand the science? Did they adequately put resources into resolving key scientific issues like trawling and the implications of reduced size in the catch? Did they adequately assess the difference between Research survey data and the Commercial catch data? Did they adjust CPUE for advancing technology? Did they adequately assess the accuracy of the data supplied by the commercial fleets? Did they include in the TACs (and mortality estimates) not only the fish caught and brought to a fish plant, but also those fish caught but discarded at sea?

The first question is: was there any reason to suspect that the fishery might suffer or even collapse?

-- Yes. As shown on the graph, there were numerous credible and explicit written warnings:

So howcome the proper action wasn't taken? Warnings should have been addressed properly, and neither ignored nor dismissed without good scrutable reasons. But unfortunately the warnings were not taken seriously.

Did DFO know about discarding, misreporting, high-grading? Of course. Anybody who talked to a few folks at the harbour could soon find out. Were estimates of those mortalities incorporated into assessments? No. Why? Slackness. Diane Vaughan, on the Columbia shuttle accident, referred to a sociological phenomenon that she calls "normalization of deviation". A subset of "groupthink", NOD is the downgrading of risks associated with mistakes that have been common but have not yet resulted in failure. Chunks of foam often fell off the shuttle's external tank, but the nicks and cracks caused in the shuttle's tiles hadn't (yet) brought one down; so they were downgraded as a risk but without a thorough assessment of the risk. Some personnel used an analogy that diminished the perception of hazard, likening it to a car hitting a styrofoam cooler lid on the highway. Only when engineers pointed out that the piece of foam had a relative velocity of 500 mph (830 kph), and accelerated a chunk to that speed and blew it through a wing panel, was the importance of the hazard acknowledged. Too late.

There were many excellent scientists working within DFO, and many of them recognised trouble coming. Unfortunately they were generally inhibited or prohibited from speaking out. If one cannot speak freely, can one fully be a scientist? If a government scientist is constrained from speaking freely, does the public actually get its money's worth from that scientist?
    There are a lot of very perceptive fishermen, and many of them also recognised trouble coming.
    Even in the 1960s fishermen were talking about the future consequences of bottom trawling, of fishing capelin. Unfortunately the dialogue between fishermen and DFO couldn't be described as easy. Dialogue is in any case not helped by prohibiting your scientists from speaking freely. The people who implemented the 'gag rule' that prevented scientists from speaking freely were bureaucrats and (we suppose) politicians. A local playwright, Michael Cook, wrote a play in 1973, called "Head Guts and Sound-Bone Dance" predicting a barren sea and the devastation of a culture and way of life. He wrote the play because he had heard the concerns of fishermen, and found them worth considering. DFO didn't.

So, given the warnings, as shown on the graph, why did the government not act on them? Some of them even originated within government, or were commissioned by government. The Minister of Fisheries finally sets quotas, and the federal Cabinet can decide how to deal with the international dimensions of fishery regulation. What makes intelligent people stand by and watch a major resource get eliminated? One can speculate that it must be a mix of influence, lobbying, as well as perceptions of natural resources as limitless, as well as political timetables that are very short compared to the timetables on which good management must be based.

DFO scientists can publish papers, but there is 'internal review' that can alter the paper's content. Scientists generally cannot freely talk with the press, or perhaps even the public. There's a thing called the "official spokesperson policy" (gag rule) which means that employees of the department are not to speak on topics for which an "official spokesperson" has been designated. Also, publicly disagreeing with the Minister is considered a violation -- but in hindsight there's no denying the Minister was wrong, so in hindsight we'd have to be idiots to not disagree with at least one (long-gone) Minister. Where did the Minister go wrong? Either he knowingly made the wrong decision, or got wrong advice. Pick one, that's all the options there are. Tough to know your senior bureaucratic advisors are wrong, if the people whose work they've misunderstood aren't allowed to point out the error. Whose heads rolled? Nobody's. Accountability? Forget it. That is why change is required.
    For the process of scientific advice to make any sense, advice has to be properly sought (key questions must be a research priority), and properly used (not ignored, misquoted or cherry-picked).
    Only by making scientists free to comment on the relation of their own work to departmental policy and decisions can the public get its money's worth; which in this case might have been a functioning and healthy fishery.

    What would we rather avoid: a collapsed fishery or an embarrassed Minister?
    What would we rather have: [a] a good healthy fishery and a Minister who has to open his decisions to scrutiny, OR [b] a collapsed fishery and a Minister who can do more or less anything he likes without accounting for it? The Minister is one person; the 40,000 people directly thrown out of work as a result of the fishery closure (1992) are, well, 40,000 people.
    Do the people work for the Minister, or does the Minister work for the people?

    Clearly, experience tells us we don't have the balance right, and we need more accountability on the Minister and more open-ness in the system that generates decisions that affect not only the 40,000 people thrown out of work, lives ruined, ways of life lost, culture and tradition lost.

    The system of ethics that we need is one that would prohibit and inhibit, for example, a resource manager from mis-citing science, or citing nonexistent science in support of a bad decision; and it would give to scientists whose work is being misconstrued a right if not an obligation to openly alert the public to the error. Many support this; but from the unimaginative few who are comforted by everything status quo, the standard chorus has been "Oh, that would be chaos". No, I retort; that would be a little bit of rationality to replace the chaos that cost us the cod fishery.

Foreign Fishing

Foreign fishing is a serious issue. NAFO (North Atlantic Fisheries Organisation) allows "contracting parties" (countries) to file an "objection" to a quota set by NAFO, and then to set its own 'unilateral' quota. Thus, if some number of thousands of tonnes of catch are called "illegal", it would mean illegal with respect to that unilateral quota, which in turn may have been vastly greater than the NAFO-advised quota, which may in turn be greater than the Canadian-advised quota, which may in turn be greater than the quota officially advised by DFO science, which may in turn be greater than that advisable in a conservative sense. It is up to the federal government whether that situation continues or not, and it is up to the electorate to press government to act (that is what these pages are about).

   NOSE AND TAIL, FLEMISH CAP: Beyond 200 nm, management is not by Canada alone, but by NAFO. Because the 200nm line cuts out fringe areas (Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks) and excludes the Flemish Cap altogether, those areas are vulnerable to fishing under the "objection" procedure; one might as well say it's an unregulated free-for-all, with a few constraints on mesh size. Infractions there are often reported in the Press, but unlike poachers and drug smugglers who lose their vehicles etc., fishery violations, even those with clear deliberateness shown by undersize mesh or nets cut loose in attempts to lose the evidence or double/fake sets of log books or hidden storage compartments, do not lose their boats.

   The future? "Law of the Sea" cannot forever mean "no law at all". Law throughout history follows need, not the other way around. Law will have to meet the need to stop buccaneering, but just as Iceland's unilateral action led to a new stage in the Law of the Sea, Canada needs to extent its jurisdiction over all the shelf (Nose, Tail, Flemish Cap (though there's hardly anything left on the Flemish Cap)).
    We probably will eventually see, must see, some day, an exclusive jurisdiction* of every spot in the ocean. Jurisdiction will probably be on the basis of Equidistance, i.e. defined as the country owning the nearest point of land, possibly modified by the significance of the piece of land (area, historic habitation, etc.). Countries could of course agree mutually to alter that, or agree to exchange the management burden. (*In terms of fisheries and other uses/abuses of the seas -- ocean dumping, ocean mining -- and of law such that problems such as piracy become the clear prevention and prosecution responsibility of an identified state.)
    By saying we need to take control of these resources, I am not saying we as a country have not made our own problems -- we have fished irresponsibly and managed irresponsibly and we also need to take control away from people who have failed that responsibility. However, once fishery management becomes a solely domestic, it will no longer be possible to blame the foreigners, we'll have to see it done right ourselves. Likewise, it is tough to argue for restraint on the part of domestic fishermen, and for closure of fisheries, if foreign fleets are free from those restraints.

   See some DFO enforcement pictures. Here is one picture (from the DFO site) of the catch of (presumably) the Brites net. According to the pictures & captions, the Spanish fishing vessel Brites was inspected in 2004; it "lost" its trawl net (recovered by DFO; the clean cut end of the rope on the recovered trawl shows it was cut, not broken under strain), and the catch was 64% composed of moratorium species. The DFO caption says it is consistent with a 'take-it-all' approach to fishing.

FAO's excellent Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (follow links to Code and Text of Code). Note especially the section on Fisheries Management and Precautionary Approach. The FAO Code is a decent document.
      ... but ... for some farcical abuse of the idea of the FAO Code, look at the Award given to "The Canadian Responsible Fisheries Board and its Secretariat" in 2001 for its "unprecedented grassroot approach to the development of a national Code of Conduct based on the FAO Code ..."; but the CRFB's 'code' is a vacuous document with little apparent relationship to the FAO Code. CRFB has practically dropped out of sight (Aug 2004: its web sites don't seem to exist anymore) and its Secretariat was, guess who, DFO. Yet more empty money-wasting flim-flam.

Ethics and Science

      ... and the history of Northern Cod fishery with nearly 3 decades of ignored warnings. (PARADI conference) talk (html)
    The loss of this great fishery had many proximate causes, but one ultimately facilitating cause: government scientists who knew or suspected that there were problems were constrained in what they were allowed to disclose.
    Scientists therefore need to be guided by ethical principles that recognise the responsibilities to [a] the resource, [b] to the public that is affected by that resource, [c] to the public that pays for the research on that resource, and ultimately [d] to science, which cannot function in an environment of information control* and requires that scientists be able to share and discuss their understanding. Failing in the last, there is the illusion, but little more than the illusion, of science.

A few excellent papers:

[1] Steele, D. H., Andersen, R., & Green, J. M., 1992. The managed commercial annihilation of Northern Cod. Newfoundland Studies, 8(1), 34-68.

[2] Hutchings, J.A.., Walters, C., & Haedrich, R. L., 1997. Is scientific inquiry incompatible with government information control? Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci., 54, 1198-1210.

[3] Ames, E. P., 1997. Cod and haddock spawning grounds in the Gulf of Maine. 33 pp. Rockland, ME, USA: Island Institute. (Difficult to find; with the author's and publisher's consent and help I have placed a copy of this in the MUN Library. I learned of this work from the redoubtable Ram Myers.)

[4]  For others on Cod and world fisheries, see R. A. Myers's web site. For world fisheries issues, see D. Pauly web site and the Census of Marine Life for diversity issues beyond fisheries.