Newfoundland cod
Five centuries of fishing, then a moratorium in 1992 that put tens of thousands out of work in one announcement. It did not fail under open access. It failed under a quota.
- Place
- Newfoundland and the Grand Banks, CA
- Founded
- 1497
- Ended
- 1992
- Duration
- 495 years
What is held
Northern cod — on the offshore banks, and on the inshore grounds a boat could reach and return from in a day.
Who is in
Before Confederation, a berth on an inshore ground, held by custom and by the family that had always fished it. Afterwards, a licence issued by the federal government — which moved the boundary from the community to the state, and made it national rather than local.
Who decides
The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, advised by its own scientists, setting a Total Allowable Catch. Before 1949, the community and the merchant who bought the fish.
How the rules are made
Federal regulation. The quota was set annually, and through the 1980s was repeatedly set above what the department's own stock assessments would have supported.
How cheating is caught
Observers, dockside monitoring and logbooks. Discarding and misreporting were known about and hard to quantify — a monitoring system that existed and did not measure the thing that mattered.
The sanction ladder
- A warning, or a condition attached to the licence
- A fine
- Licence suspension
- Licence revocation, and forfeiture of gear or vessel
4 rungs, in order of escalation, for Newfoundland cod.
What happens in a bad year
The quota was cut, then cut again, and on 2 July 1992 the fishery was closed outright. Roughly thirty thousand people lost their work at once. It has not reopened at anything like its former scale.
Notes on the account
This page exists to complicate the simple story, and it should not be allowed to swap in a different simple story instead.
The cod did not collapse because nobody owned them and everybody took what they liked. From 1977 the stock sat inside Canada’s two-hundred-mile limit, under a single national authority, with scientists, a quota, licences, observers and an enforcement ladder. Every institution the standard prescription calls for was present. The stock collapsed anyway, and the mechanism was in the numbers: the assessments overestimated the biomass, the quota was set against the overestimate, and the inshore fishermen who were catching nothing were telling anyone who would listen for years before the science agreed.
Put beside the Mongolian pastures, this is the pair that matters. One arrangement failed after the state took over; the other failed after the state withdrew. Neither ideology gets a free pass, and a gallery that printed only one of them would be making an argument rather than describing a case.
What is not settled in this draft
The causal account in the paragraph above is the strongest claim on this page and the one most likely to be too clean. Foreign fishing before 1977, changes in water temperature, seals, and the technological jump to draggers all have serious advocates. HC-008 is asked whether the picture is more mixed, and to say how.
Sources
- Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977 to 1990 — Alan Christopher Finlayson, ISER Books, 1994.
- The Death of the Grand Banks Cod Fishery — Bonnie J. McCay and Alan Christopher Finlayson, in the fisheries co-management literature; cited for the argument that the failure was one of assessment and quota-setting rather than of open access.