Cod Comeback

By Paul Greenberg, Safina Center Fellow

Ever since the author Mark Kurlansky published his international bestseller Cod, it has been an article of faith in the media that cod are doomed. Kurlansky's pronouncement at the book's outset that Newfoundland fishermen who found their famous grounds closed until further notice in the late 1980s were at the "wrong end of a 1000 year fishing spree."  He then goes on to recount the sad tale of diminishment beginning with the Basque discovery of the Atlantic codfish grounds, through the industrial revolution's invention of bottom trawling on up through the Great Wars and the battleship sized processing vessels they inspired. Add in climate change, short-sighted regulators and a propensity among humans to push things to the limit under the philosophy of "Maximum Sustainable Yield" and you have all the recipes for a sad story to be told over and over again. So often has the story been told that one New England politician noted to me recently "In Massachusetts today there are more documentaries about the collapse of cod than there are cod. 

Except, in one part of the world, the narrative no longer holds true. Over the last two weeks I have been sailing aboard Lindblad's National Geographic Explorer from Bergen, along the Norwegian Coast headed toward Svalbard Island. Toward the end of our first week at sea we pulled into the village of Reine in the Lototen Islands, a codfish grounds even more famous than Newfoundland's.

The Lofoten Islands are largely responsible for transforming cod from a modest local delicacy into the first commodity fish. All over the Village of Reine one can still see racks and racks of codfish drying in the cold air--a process that renders the bodies into a shelf stable product known more commonly by its Spanish name, bacalao. The "fish on Friday" habit of European Catholics in Europe was mostly supplied by Lofoten and expresses itself in different national recipes from Portugal to Russia. In the Kurlanskyian mode, this is the warning bell that spells the disaster for cod. Industrialization leads to bigger ships which lead to bigger catches which inevitably lead to collapse. 

Cod. Photo: Paul Greenberg

But instead of spiraling down into commercial extinction, Norwegian cod stocks have made a remarkable recovery. The change is largely due to a strategic choice made in an atmosphere of rigorous science and transparency. Unlike the US and Canada, Norway and Russia did rigorous collaborative research as early as the 1960s that allowed them to more fully understand the biology of their fish and how best to apply a precautionary approach to management. This also helped the two countries gradually move toward what are known as individual transferable quotas or ITQs. ITQs pre-allocate fish tonnage to a given number of vessels and greatly reduce the risk of a chaotic "race for fish". Of course they are not fool proof. When the US finally started introducing ITQs into its fishery, New Bedford's infamous "Codfather" gobbled up quota for his vessels and then fudged the records to disguise the amount of cod his fleet actually caught behind a curtain of fraud.  This combined with the fact that the New England disaster may have been too little too late for sound management may mean we may never see Norwegian sized catches which in this past year have seen commercial and sport anglers regularly bring in specimens over 30 pounds.

Photo: Paul Greenberg

But in Norway, a country that has a firm belief in managing for the collective good, ITQs have worked. And though some credit the boom in cod off the Lofotens with a warming ocean and a more productive bloom of capelin (codfish's primary prey) humans have shown time and time again that they often illogically squander abundance. For the moment logic is ruling over the codfish of Lofoten ensuring that Europe, for now, will continue to have fish on Fridays, and maybe on Saturdays and Sundays too.

Photo: Paul Greenberg