The Plundered Seas

Raymond B. Blake is director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount
Allison University, the author of Canadians at Last: Canada Integrates
Newfoundland as a Province, and the co-author of The Welfare State in
Canada: Past, Present and Future.

Canadians know all too well how their own fisheries have been ravaged
over the past two decades. In fact, the Canadian fishery is no different
from many others around the world. Most of the major fishing grounds
have already been overfished or are in danger of becoming so. The world
catch of fish has stopped growing, but the global fishing capacity
continues to increase along with demand for fish products. This book
attempts to provide an explanation for the global crisis in the fishery
and to offer some solutions.

As the author points out, the fishing industry is an important one.
More than 200 million people around the world depend on this industry
for their living. There are more than a million fishing boats plying the
oceans, far more than are required to catch the available fish.
Unregulated open access to many of the world’s fish stocks have made
boom-and-bust cycles the order of the day. Overfished stocks include
Pacific salmon, the North Atlantic groundfish, the California sardine,
and the Peruvian anchoveta. Ecological problems, Berrill notes, have
only compounded the problems of overfishing.

Berrill proposes the usual solutions: cutting fish quotas and reducing
the number of licensed vessels, establishing a new approach to fisheries
management that will ensure a sustainable fishery and control access to
the fish stocks, and introducing changes to fishing technology. However,
he does not indicate how the fishing nations might come to agree on
these changes; that, unfortunately, remains the problem because most of
these nations have known for more than two decades that the current
practices would be destructive.