We’ve got a strange relationship with fish.
On the one hand, Nova Scotia pretty much is fish. The human
geography of the province consists mainly of hundreds of settlements
built around the coves and inlets that stretch along our coasts. From
the Mi’kmaq forward, fishing has been the foundation of the local
economy and fishing continues to be one of our primary industries.
Moreover, those picturesque fishing villages are also the main lure of
the tourist trade—another primary industry.
Our cultural geography is, likewise, constructed around fishing and
the sea; from the ballads and songs about Nova Scotia to the decor of
the student bars downtown, fishing serves as a cultural
self-identifier.
On the other hand, who here in the city really knows anything about
fish? There’s not even a daily fishmonger on the peninsula: a place to
buy fresh fish on the way home from our office jobs. Sure, there are
any number of seafood restaurants in town in which we can indulge our
seafaring-roots fantasy, but the fish served in local restaurants often
has no connection whatsoever with the villages and industry we embrace
as our own.
Welcome to the global fish economy. There’s always been an
international trade in fish—the fishing villages on our coast existed
in the first place thanks to exports of salted cod to Europe—but the
hyper-global trade that defines modern fishing began in 1972, when a
Japanese businessman figured out how to navigate the technological and
administrative roadblocks standing in the way of shipping tuna caught
off Prince Edward Island to Japan. Thus began the global sushi craze
and, following that, the realization that anyone who could afford it
could eat fish caught anywhere.
So now a diner at Picasso’s, a mid-range seafood restaurant in
Winnipeg, can order grouper flown in fresh from Portugal and the Five
Fishermen restaurant in Halifax, just blocks away from the edge of the
Scotian Shelf, once one of the most productive fisheries on Earth,
serves Chilean sea bass.
The marvels of the international seafood industry are explained by
the proprietor of a local sushi house: “Japanese fish companies
purchase 3,000 tonnes of mackerel from the shores of the Atlantic
provinces every year, ship it to Tokyo, where it is cured in brine and
seaweed from three to six months, packaged as shime saba and shipped
back to Vancouver, where I purchase it from a supplier and serve
approximately 300 pounds of it a year. It is a delicacy of sorts,
unable to be reproduced anywhere in the world.”
Cockroaches of the sea
Truly, from the consumer’s perspective, the globalized seafood
industry has taken dining to new heights. But it’s the worst thing that
could have happened to the fisheries.
In a 2003 paper published in the scientific journal Nature,
Dalhousie University marine biologists Ransom Myers and Boris Worm
found that since the beginning of industrialized fishing in the 1950s,
90 percent of the world’s large fish had disappeared. “[W]e have only
10 percent of all large fish—both open-ocean species including tuna,
swordfish, marlin and the large groundfish such as cod, halibut, skates
and flounder—left in the sea,” wrote Myers in a press release.
That process had been so accelerated by the $80 billion (US)
globalized annual seafood trade that Worm warned in a 2006 paper
published in Science that if present trends continue there will
be no fish at all within 40 years. “It’s within our lifetime,” Worm
told the Washington Post. “Our children will see a world without
seafood if we don’t change things.”
Those warnings were met with skepticism by much of the world, but
Atlantic Canadians paused when they heard the prediction, because in
the early 1990s our region experienced a textbook example of fishery
collapse.
The state of the Nova Scotia fishing industry is the subject of
Fisheries and the Marine Environment in Nova Scotia, a report
issued last month by Halifax think-tank GPI Atlantic.
The report notes that by all conventional measures—the size of the
annual catch, the value of fish exports and the fisheries’ contribution
to the province’s gross domestic product—the ground fisheries (cod,
pollock and haddock) off Nova Scotia were in excellent shape, growing
every year from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Through the 1980s, warnings from marine biologists that groundfish
were being over-fished were ridiculed and ignored. Regulators pointed
at the high-catch numbers and big money being brought in by fish
exports as proof that there was nothing to worry about.
Those numbers, however, didn’t measure the underlying health of the
ecosystem. “Over that time period, ‘behind the scenes,’ fish stocks
were dropping, and by 1992-1993, many fisheries were collapsing, and
the fabric of coastal communities began to unravel,” wrote lead author
Anthony Charles.
Just like that, practically overnight, the groundfish
disappeared.
GPI argues convincingly that different measures should be used to
value the fisheries, including consideration for the health of fishing
communities and the number of young people pursuing careers in fishing,
among others. On the purely monetary side of the equation, GPI seeks a
fuller accounting; one measure used in the report is the value of the
natural capital of the fish in the sea—that is, the dollars that
would be brought in if every last fish was plucked out of the ocean and
sold at market rates.
Looking at it from that point of view, the collapse is especially
dramatic. The report explains: “The value of natural capital for cod in
the Eastern Scotian Shelf region off Nova Scotia increased through the
1980s to a peak of $200 million in 1987, but then exhibited a steady
decline in value from 1987 to 2002, as the collapse of the cod stock
led to historically low levels of natural capital in 2002 (the most
recent year in our data). By 2002, virtually the entire $200-million
value that had been present in the Eastern Scotian Shelf cod stock had
been wiped out—what was left amounted to only an estimated $9 million
in 2002.”
On the Scotian Shelf, 16 years after the collapse, there is still no
evidence of a recovery for the cod fishery. It may be gone forever.
Haddock and pollock are still depressed, but their numbers are
increasing slightly.
Even in conventional GDP terms, the fishery isn’t healthy. In the
three years after the groundfish collapse, the GDP for the fishing
industry was cut nearly in half. Since then, the fishery has increased
in value somewhat, but it’s still at only 80 percent of the 1992
level.
And that increase comes mostly from one species: lobster. With no
groundfish to catch, the industry, and especially the South Shore
fishing communities, focused increasingly on lobster.
There’s nothing wrong with catching lobster—it gives people an
income and it brings a lot of money into Nova Scotia. That’s good.
But the GPI report underscores two problems with an over-reliance on
lobster. First, although trapping lobster seems not to adversely affect
the environment (in the way, say, bottom trawling does), we don’t
really know if it’s possible to over-catch them.
We don’t have the kind of biomass numbers for lobster out in the sea
that GPI used for finding the natural capital of groundfish, so we’re
left with making guesses based on how many pounds of lobster are hauled
in and sold. Those numbers increased through the 1980s, but then
remained stable through 2001, suggesting the lobster fishery was in
good health. But since then, the numbers increased dramatically, to
20,000 tonnes—about five times what was being caught in the
1970s.
Then, in 2007, the take of lobster plunged 30 percent from 2006
levels. Was this the beginning of a general collapse of the lobster
fishery, just as the groundfish had collapsed in the 1990s? Such a
thing has never happened with lobsters. It’s hard to say what it means
for the future.
The second problem with the over-reliance on lobster, says GPI, is
that if, for whatever reason, the market goes south, there goes the
value of the entire industry and the thousands of jobs that depend on
it.
And sure enough, in November of last year the global financial
collapse hit home. Americans suddenly found lobster an unnecessary
luxury. Nova Scotian processors couldn’t sell much lobster and so the
price paid to those catching lobster collapsed; in a desperate attempt
to make ends meet, lobstermen and women began hawking their catch to
locals from the back of pickup trucks around the province.
The price of lobster recently recovered somewhat. Still, the episode
underscores the precarious nature of a one-species industry.
Both GPI and Susanna Fuller, a marine biologist and marine
conservation co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre, make the
further point that the lobster economy relies on the lowest trophic
level of the sea—the bottom of the food chain.
“We’ve got a fishery dominated by invertebrates,” says Fuller. “It’s
like we only eat cockroaches instead of cows. There’s nowhere else to
go, unless we start eating jellyfish like the Japanese have.”
Better fish
With fisheries collapsing and the industrialized global food network
making things worse, a conscientious eater might be inclined to eat
less fish, or none at all, for the sake of the planet. Opting out,
however, doesn’t much affect the fish economy.
It may seem counterintuitive, but activists and many working in the
fisheries say the best way to help the fish environment, and to help
local fishing communities, is to eat more fish, not less. That is, so
long as we insist on high-quality, locally caught and environmentally
sustainable fish.
Of late, many consumers have come to value local agriculture, as
books like The 100 Mile Diet become bestsellers and local
farmers’ markets have record sales. It’s time, says Fuller, to bring
that local food consciousness to seafood. “We’re five or 10 years
behind the terrestrial food market,” she explains. “All the chefs in
town, they know who produces their pork, they know who they get their
potatoes from:the higher-end chefs, they have a personal connection to
their supplier. But they have no idea who catches their fish—it comes
in a truck, with a driver, who’s not responsible for the fish. So that
connection to the people who are fishing, and respecting fish as food,
I don’t know that we have it here.”
Like its local land-food counterpart, those advocating for local
seafood envision a thriving small-market economy, with lots and lots of
people working on the water to catch relatively few fish each. In order
for them to make a living, the price of sustainably caught fish will
have to be higher than the fish caught by gigantic trawlers pumping
product into the international fish economy, just as the price of
sustainably raised local beef is higher than industrialized beef
shipped in from South America.
There are, says Fuller, three local fisheries that especially need
our support.
First is the trap-caught shrimp of Chedabucto Bay, outside Canso, a
small town that has been struggling since the ground fisheries
collapsed. Trapping shrimp does little or no damage to the environment,
but until recently, there has been no way for consumers to ask for
these shrimp directly—they were simply dumped into the larger shrimp
economy, undistinguished from any other shrimp caught on the
planet.
Recently, however, the Ecology Action Centre has been pushing to get
the Chedabucto shrimp separately labelled and to convince local
consumers to put a premium value on them—that is, to pay more money,
just as they’d pay more for local organic apples. In season, the shrimp
are available at Fisherman’s Market on the Bedford Highway and through
Local Source Market in the north end.
Fuller’s second example is Digby clams. Like the trap-caught shrimp,
clams can be a sustainably caught species that doesn’t harm the
environment, but the clam diggers in and around Digby are having a
rough time of it due to repeated beach closures related to raw sewage
discharges from the town’s sewage plant. Clammers are joining with
environmentalists to push for a solution to the sewage issue, but they
don’t seem to get much traction with government officials, who perhaps
see them as inconsequential.
Ken Weir, president of the of the Annapolis Basin Clam Harvesters’
Association, says his group favours a strict quota system combined with
a beach clean-up and repair of the sewer system. But like lobsters, the
clam market took a hit with the global financial collapse. “We’re too
dependent on the American markets,” he says. “We should be shipping
within Canada and not worrying about these other markets.”
As Fuller and Weir see it, local awareness and consumption of Digby
clams raises the political profile of the fishery, which in turn will
put pressure on government to resolve the sewage and beach-closure
issues, giving yet more value to the fishery and supporting the
communities that depend on it.
Many local restaurants offer and advertise Digby clams, but some
that serve them seem unaware of the potential added value they can
claim in consumers’ eyes. “We have to work on local branding,” says
Fuller. “Probably nobody even knows the clams at Gus’ Pub are Digby
clams.”
Fuller’s third example is harpoon-caught swordfish. Remarkably, Nova
Scotia’s South Shore is the only place in the world where there are
still people—33 of them, exactly—who harpoon for swordfish. Because
there is no bycatch—other fish caught up in lines or nets—this is
another environmentally sustainably way of fishing and, like Fuller’s
other examples, it is labour-intensive, relative to the longline boats
that ply farther out to sea. But harpoon-caught swordfish are not
differentiated from the line-caught swordfish and so there is, as yet,
no way for consumers to pay premium prices for it.
This frustrates Fuller. “They say it’s because if we call the 10
percent of swordfish that are harpooned ‘sustainable,’ we’re calling
the other 90 percent ‘unsustainable,’ or bad for the environment,” she
says. “But you have organic lettuce at the Superstore, and you have
your non-organic lettuce, and people can make a consumer choice. Are
you thinking it’s being judgemental against iceberg lettuce when you
buy your organic spinach?”
While Fuller wants regulatory action on this front, the cause would
be helped if consumers started demanding harpooned swordfish.
Besides asking for those specific species, consumers should ask for
local fish that are caught with sustainable gear, says Mark Butler, the
director at EAC who worked on fishing boats for 10 years. “I’ve spent a
lot of time looking at gear,” he says.
Butler is a fan of handlining, the kind of fishing most associated
with recreational fishing, but which was the traditional means of
commercial fishing—basically, throwing a line with a hook over the
side and pulling it up. “It’s the most selective form of fishing, it’s
the highest quality of fish, it employs the most people per pound of
fish caught—all the things we like,” he says. “But these guys are
almost gone now; they’ve been replaced with draggers and
long-liners.”
It will take widespread demand for hook-and-line-caught fish to
budge the buyers toward making it more available, says Butler. “Mike’s
Fish at the Farmers’ Market now starts to indicate what is
hook-and-line and what is not, and sometimes charges a premium for it.
If it’s only me that asks, or Susanna, then he’s going to say, ‘meh,’
but if 10 or 20 percent of his customers start asking, then he’s going
to do something about it.”
The way the fish world works
But let’s be clear: Nova Scotia’s fishing industry almost entirely
relies on exports and probably will continue to rely on exports for the
foreseeable future. Most people who fish aren’t much interested in what
they now see as tiny boutique markets for local and sustainably caught
fish; they simply want to sell lots of fish to whoever’s buying, which
in today’s world means the global industrial fish trade.
Unfortunately, the consumers in the American Midwest (or wherever)
don’t care about how or where fish from Atlantic Canada are
caught—it’s simply not a consideration.
And why should it be, when people living right here in the supposed
fishing-informed culture of Nova Scotia don’t pay much heed to such
issues?
“I tried to sell portioned halibut in pre-packaged trays, with a
‘locally caught’ label,” says Donny Hart of Sambro Fisheries. “No one
was interested.”
But neither was there, 20 years ago, much interest in organic
vegetables or, five years ago, even the concept of local agriculture
having added value.
We’ve got a long way to go to get to sustainable fisheries and
therefore to give real support to local fishing communities. And the
bureaucratic and industrial obstacles are substantial, seemingly
overwhelming. But increased awareness at the fish markets and
restaurants will begin to create its own political demands and maybe
it’ll be possible to slow the industrial fishing boat down and begin
turning it around.
It starts with the consumer.
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This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2009.