Why the Cod Are Vanishing.(fishing industry, analysis)

For the past decade the North Sea cod fishery has been shrinking--and everybody knew, or should have known, that a disaster was coming. Fishermen knew it was getting harder and harder to find cod; most years they haven't even been able to catch their government-set quotas. Scientists warned repeatedly that the cod population was declining steadily, because most cod were being caught and eaten before they could reproduce. And fish eaters knew that cod, once the hamburger of the sea, had become almost a delicacy: in Britain an order of fish and chips now goes for as much as [Pound sterling]4. Everybody knew, or should have known, that drastic measures were called for.

Very late and a bit tentatively, someone has finally done something drastic. In December the European Union and Norway, which jointly manage the North Sea, announced a 40 percent cut in the catch quota for cod, along with similar cuts for other endangered fish. And starting next week about a fifth of the North Sea--a swath stretching from Scotland to the Netherlands--will be closed to bottom trawling for 12 weeks, to give the bottom-dwelling cod a chance to spawn. Some fishing- industry spokesmen in Britain denounced the cuts as "savage" and "a disaster," and that's how they will no doubt feel to fishermen facing the economic consequences. But even more painful cuts will probably be needed to bring back the cod.

The North Sea is not the only region facing a fishing crisis, of course. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, 28 percent of the world's fish stocks are overfished or already depleted. An additional 47 percent are being fished to the limit. In the early 1990s the huge cod stock on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland collapsed, forcing the Canadian government to close that fishery altogether; it still hasn't reopened. That wasn't enough, though, to scare the Europeans into action. "The North Sea is arguably the best-studied system," says Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. "You have very good scientists, it's ringed with marine labs--so the fact that you can't control the fishing there is a very poor sign."

In Europe, as elsewhere, the process of fisheries management only begins with science. It ends with politics. Each year a committee of scientists from the nations that ring the North Sea meet in Copenhagen to assess the status of each fish stock. The scientists deliver advice on how many fish should be caught in the following year--the Total Allowable Catch. The EU's ultimate decisions, though--which then have to be negotiated with nonmember Norway--are made by council of fisheries ministers from the member states. Inevitably--though, listening to fishermen lately, you might not guess it--those politicians tend to put the short-term interests of their own fishing industry above the long-term demands of maintaining stocks. "The ultimate decisions are taken on political grounds to keep the industry alive," says Sarah Jones of the World Wildlife Fund.

But science, too, contributes to the problem--because even very good scientists aren't very good at counting the fish in the sea. The general state of North Sea cod has been clear enough. "Essentially, it's been a downward trend for nearly 30 years," says Robin Cook of the Fisheries Research Service Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, Scotland. But in any given year the data are not precise enough to command action. Since the political decision makers can't know exactly where the cliff is--the point at which the stock collapses and cod become too scarce to be worth chasing--they can feel better about letting the crisis go unsolved.

As it happens, the scientific data for the North Sea have been especially unreliable in recent years. Scientists have two ways of counting fish. They do their own research surveys, returning each year to the same points to trawl with the same gear and see how many fish they get. But they also rely heavily on the much dodgier catch data supplied by commercial vessels. Basically they try to gauge the size of the stock from how hard fishermen are finding it to catch fish. If there are fewer fish in the sea, the assumption is, fishermen will need more time to catch a given amount.

That assumption proved badly wrong in Newfoundland, and it helped bring about the disaster there. Last year it proved badly wrong in ...