Moratorium means more than “Northern Cod”

Friday, 17 August 2012 18:35 |  Author: Gabe Gregory, op-ed |   

Twenty years have past since the groundfish moratoria were declared. Most people think of one species and one groundfish stock when the word moratorium is mentioned. The word moratorium has become synonymous with the Northern Cod stock only. This is most unfortunate because while northern cod was our largest and most important groundfish stock, it represented only about 25% of groundfish landed. The magnitude of the groundfish collapse impacted much beyond Northern Cod.

The groundfish moratoria devastated the rural economy of our Province. The most productive towns and communities in the industry were lost due to the groundfish collapse. These include Port aux Choix, Port aux Basques, Ramea, Burgeo, Hr. Breton, Gaultois, Fortune, Grand Bank, Burin, Marystown, Trepassey, Hr. Grace, Port Union and St. Anthony. In addition, many other communities lost the most important component of their economy. While the inshore groundfish industry was primarily based on cod, it seasonally provided substantially more employment for longer periods and contributed to the economy of many more communities than is currently derived from shellfish.

TAGS: groundfish,moratorium, northern cod, shellfish, rebuilding strategy, NL fishery

The groundfish collapse has had a profound effect on the south and west coast communities of NL. In fact, NL’s most productive cod stock was the stock known as Northern Gulf cod. For many years the Gulf cod stock yielded in excess of 100,000 tonnes mainly by inshore-based fleets. In addition, tens of thousands of tonnes of Gulf redfish and flatfish were harvested. Now you come to realize how important groundfish stocks were to the communities along NL’s west coast. Similarly, the south coast communities were supplied by vast groundfish landings from Grand Banks and St. Pierre Bank stocks of flounder, cod, redfish, yellowtail, greysole and haddock. These stocks combined yielded much greater harvests and employment than those derived from Northern cod.

Why is it that as NLer’s we have forgotten what we have lost and what the groundfish collapse/moratoria really and truly mean? Why is it that after twenty years we have no recovery of groundfish? The reasons vary but chief among them is our failure to implement conservation- based fish management of our fish resources. Rather than follow sound scientific advice and the principles of the precautionary approach to manage fish resources, we continue to establish annual catch limits based on short-term socio-political motivations while at the same time largely ignoring science. The fact is that groundfish species have life spans ranging between a decade and two (flatfishes and cod) while others range up to five decades and longer (redfish).

Unfortunately, the past two decades have not been devoted to rebuilding groundfish stocks. We have instead chosen to continue to exploit groundfish stocks at much lower levels. These lower harvest levels however, reflect relatively high exploitation on these stocks, particularly given their depressed spawning stock biomass levels, poor recruitment, etc. The decisions to exploit groundfish resources are driven by our need to sustain a very marginal economic attachment to the fishery to gain access to income support through the EI system. Indeed, our once productive communities have all been replaced by an unsustainable over-reliance on depressed and over-exploited fishery resources and the EI system.

The marginal attachment to the fishery is probably best exemplified by reviewing fishing effort and participation. It is alarming to compare the participation rates in the fishery today as compared to just a couple of decades ago.  During the recent MOU process it was revealed that the average larger fishing enterprise (> 40 feet) operates less than 40 days per year while the smaller vessels (< 40 feet) operate less than 20 days on average. Consequently, dependence on income support (fishers EI program) has increased over the past two decades. By comparison, in the 1980’s, fishing enterprises operated several months each year (May-October) and accessed EI during the months of November through April.

Even though shellfish, particularly snow crab, is more abundant, it too is being over-exploited. Over large areas, this resource is experiencing severe decline as over-exploitation is taking its toll. As shellfish declines there will likely be even greater pressures politically and socially to increase exploitation on depressed groundfish resources. There is currently no means within the fishery management systems to adjust to this resource reality.

So how do we really start to rebuild our fish resources and our rural economy? First we must use sound fishery management principles such as the precautionary approach to determine exploitation of fish resources based on the best available science. That means reducing our annual harvests and by-catches of most species. Second, we must protect and conserve any recruitment to groundfish stocks and enable successive year-classes to contribute to stock growth. That means restraining and curtailing fishing effort in favour of stock growth which must remain a steadfast goal for a period of at least the generational life span of the species (about two decades for cod). Third, we must impose the same rigorous management approach to the straddling stocks on the Grand Banks as we place upon ourselves. That means implementing conservation- based management within Canada and NAFO. We cannot expect of others what we are unwilling to do ourselves.  Fourth, we must implement sound economic principles to the management of the fishery. That means managing the fishery as we would any other natural resource. Strategies such as that outlined have been introduced round the world with much success.

A rebuilding strategy will create short-term challenges; however, the pay-off will be tremendous for generations to come. The options are limited as our fishery resources are continuing to decline and we will eventually have more widespread hardship in the rural areas than has been endured for the past two decades. While there are reasons to be optimistic about our future, opportunities can only be realized by managing differently. We should not expect any different outcomes by continuing on the path we have been on for the past two decades.

Groundfish stock rebuilding is possible. We need to change our priorities and place conservation, adherence to scientific advice, and best practices in fisheries management at the forefront.

Gabe Gregory

St. Philips, NL

Looking back at Nieman Watchdog

COMMENTARY | August 20, 2012

Barry Sussman reflects on the accomplishments of the Nieman Watchdog website, and the challenges to watchdog journalism that remain ahead.

Read the Nieman Foundation’s announcementfor details about the future of the Nieman Watchdog project.

By Barry Sussman
sussmanb1@gmail.com

It has been my pleasure to be editor of Nieman Watchdog but all things come to an end and this is a goodbye column. We went online in 2004. About 350 writers, many of them leaders in their fields, have taken part, almost all sharing the same goal: to encourage the press to do better reporting on public policy issues. There’s plenty of work toward that end that needs to be done. Important issues are neglected, editing is sloppy, the daily report is thinner, etc., etc.

There just isn’t enough good journalism, and there is too much forfeiting when it comes to seeking out important news. War coverage is a dismal case in point. As John Hanrahan wrote on this site, at any given time only handfuls of American reporters have covered the news from Afghanistan these last 11 years; as Sig Christenson reported in 2007, aside from the big, elite media only three regional news organizations consistently sent reporting teams to Iraq during the war there. Imagine: two terrible, lengthy wars with hardly any coverage. In surveys we did, Nieman Fellows around the world lambasted the American press – gave it a grade of D – for its coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, and implored American reporters to get out of their “he said, she said” political mode, a lament that still applies.

As a group, the traditional U.S. press has badly failed at reporting dissent in America – there’s abundant newsworthy protest but you can seldom tell it from the news media – and has failed at reporting on poverty, failed at follow-up reporting on the Bush administration torture policies and other actions, and failed to sufficiently report the Obama administration’s high-handed refusal to deal with those issues. Instead of ridiculing the obstructionist Republican party leadership in Washington and the states, as it should, the mainstream press treats them as if they have goals other than serving large corporations and the rich and suppressing the vote. Not to defend Democrats, but if the press did decent, steady reporting on politics, made fun of GOP fantasies, and if the Democrats behaved, as Paul Wellstone once put it, more like the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” then it would be hard to imagine more than a few Republicans winning national office. The press ignores climate change, a world crisis, for weeks at a time. Corporate influence on America and the remnants of a labor movement are seldom reported on at all.

Not all the news about journalism is bad. Day after day the New York Times is giving people their dollar’s worth with imaginative stories, a varied editorial page and solid investigations. At times The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, McClatchy, Rolling Stone magazine, and writers at the Washington Post do brilliant, independent reporting and commentary. Warren Buffett, promisingly, has bought dozens of regional and small town papers where, one thinks, things can only get better. An online group, theInvestigative News Network, begun in 2009, now includes 60 news organizations and seems to have taken root. Newsrooms are popping up at universities such as American University where Charles Lewis runs theInvestigative Reporting Workshop. ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrityand the Center for Investigative Reporting are doing important stories that run prominently on TV and on the front pages at major newspapers. And for people of all tastes, there is Huffington Post, the media cornucopia.

I saw it as the role of NiemanWatchdog to press for better reporting, and I’d like to single out a few contributors in particular who helped do that.

One was the late Lt. General William Odom, a cold war hawk, National Security Agency director under Ronald Reagan, historian, intellectual, author of seven books, a political science teacher at Yale – and an early, outspoken opponent of the Iraq war who began taking part in NiemanWatchdog in 2005 when, he told us, op-ed pages rejected everything he submitted. Odom’s first piece was titled “What’s wrong with cutting and running?” Its premise was that every stated reason to stay in Iraq was really a reason to get out. Odom did occasional pieces for us afterward and they were noted widely enough so that cable TV and talk radio called on him frequently; he was asked to testify at Congressional hearings and the Washington Post devoted more than half an Outlook section front page to an article of his titled “Victory is not an option.” Odom believed Nieman Watchdog was a key to his return to the limelight. If so, it shows the vitality and power of the Internet – a few articles on a not very widely known website brought Odom back, from being shunned to being very much sought after.

Then there is Henry Banta, a renaissance man posing as a D.C. lawyer. Hank has written about 50 pieces for Nieman Watchdog. His specialty is making complicated economic ideas clear enough so that even reporters can understand them, but he can tackle any subject.

Reporters and editors would do well to look up Bruce Kushnick on our site; they’ll find years of stories including very recent ones, all relevant and begging to be followed up, on the failure of the FCC to regulate the telecoms (instead Verizon, ATT and the telecoms in general are regulating the FCC). Other contributors of note include Judith Stein on health care reform and Medicare; Judith Bell on poverty; Gilbert Cranberg and Herb Strentz on explaining Iowa and other meritorious efforts; Diane Ravitch, Bill Claiborne, Martin Lobel, Jerome Starkey, Philip Coyle, Steven Kleinman, Linda Bilmes, William Astore, Philip Meyer, Chas Freeman, Mary Curtis, Myra MacPherson, John Hanrahan, Karen Greenberg, and many others.

The Nieman Watchdog site was funded by Murrey Marder’s donation to the Nieman Foundation. My colleague, Dan Froomkin, and I have edited it with Murrey’s “wake up angry” stricture in mind. Realistically, it is Dan’s site as much as mine; he got Odom and many others to take part. We have been assisted by a capable researcher, Nonna Gorilovskaya. Helping shape the thinking from the beginning, with Murrey, were the distinguished longtime Washington Post investigative reporter Morton Mintz, who served as senior adviser and contributor, and former Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles. Giles saw to it that the site got off the ground and offered encouragement and smart editing and other advice until his retirement in 2011. Also, no technical glitch or serious problem has been too tough or weird for the creative, always available Fabio Silva.

My thanks go to those who have written for Nieman Watchdog, to the thousands who subscribe to our email updates and also to more casual readers. Keep the pressure on.

It has been fun.

Barry Sussman is the editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. He is the author of The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, now in its fourth edition.  E-mail: sussmanb1@gmail.com

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NIGHT VIEW OF WESTERN WILDFIRES
In August 2012, lightning sparked numerous wildfires throughout the western United States.
* http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=78895&src=nha
 *** VIIRS(Suomi NPP) image from Aug 17, 2012 (Posted on Aug 17, 2012 5:02 PM)

Bacteria outbreak in Northern Europe due to ocean warming, study says

By Nina Chestney

LONDON | Sun Jul 22, 2012 1:03pm EDT

(Reuters) – Manmade climate change is the main driver behind the unexpected emergence of a group of bacteria in northern Europe which can cause gastroenteritis, new research by a group of international experts shows.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, provided some of the first firm evidence that the warming patterns of the Baltic Sea have coincided with the emergence of Vibrio infections in northern Europe.

Vibrios is a group of bacteria which usually grow in warm and tropical marine environments. The bacteria can cause various infections in humans, ranging from cholera to gastroenteritis-like symptoms from eating raw or undercooked shellfish or from exposure to seawater.

A team of scientists from institutions in Britain, Finland, Spain and the United States examined sea surface temperature records and satellite data, as well as statistics on Vibrio cases in the Baltic.

They found the number and distribution of cases in the Baltic Sea area was strongly linked to peaks in sea surface temperatures. Each year the temperature rose one degree, the number of vibrio cases rose almost 200 percent.

“The big apparent increases that we’ve seen in cases during heat wave years (..) tend to indicate that climate change is indeed driving infections,” Craig Baker-Austin at the UK-based Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, one of the authors of the study, told Reuters.

OCEAN WARMING

Climate studies show that rising greenhouse gas emissions made global average surface temperatures increase by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980 to 2010.

The Vibrio study focused on the Baltic Sea in particular because it warmed at an unprecedented rate of 0.063 to 0.078 degrees Celsius a year from 1982 to 2010, or 6.3 to 7.8 degrees a century.

“(It) represents, to our knowledge, the fastest warming marine ecosystem examined so far anywhere on Earth,” the paper said.

Many marine bacteria thrive in warm, low-saline sea water. In addition to warming, climate change has caused more frequent and heavier rainfall, which has reduced the salt content of estuaries and coastal wetlands.

As ocean temperatures continue to rise and coastal regions in northern regions become less saline, Vibrio bacteria strains will appear in new areas, the scientists said.

Vibrio outbreaks have also appeared in temperate and cold regions in Chile, Peru, Israel, the northwest U.S. Pacific and northwest Spain, and these can be linked to warming patterns, the scientists said.

“Very few studies have looked at the risk of these infections at high latitudes,” Baker-Austin said.

“Certainly the chances of getting a vibrio infection are considered to be relatively low, and more research is focused on areas where these diseases are endemic or at least more common,” he added.

Previous Vibrio outbreaks in colder regions have often been put down to a sporadic event or special conditions rather than a response to long-term climate change.

This is because the effects of global warming can be more pronounced at higher latitudes and in areas which lack detailed historical climate data, the study said.

Baker-Austin said there was a growing realization that climate and the emergence of some infectious diseases were closely linked but there are some “huge data gaps in that area which need addressing.”

(Editing by Tim Pearce)