Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog
Cod can live over 25 years and grow over 2m long, but few in the North Sea ever live long enough to get bigger than this
The most exiting part of the day was probably when we had some more, and a bit more advanced, boat training. Other than that today has mostly been a long and pretty uneventful boat ride to a new search area, but it got me thinking of a conversation a few of us were having a couple of nights ago about over-fishing and when someone brought up the famous cod example from the Grand Banks.
The cod fishing over there used to be quite spectacular. If you've read Mark Kurlansky's book on cod you probably remember how hundreds of years ago the English and the Basques regularly sailed over to the other side of the Atlantic in order to scoop up the "slimy gold" or whatever they might have called it in those days. And they were doing some serious fishing back then - before the invention of canned goods it was the protein rich fuel from dried and salted cod that made a large part of the long voyages and marches possible. In spite of all this fishing cod stocks in the Grand Banks were abundant for a long time until a few years of modern industrial over-fishing led to their complete collapse in1992 - leaving 40,000 fishermen out of work. Now the scientists are telling us we are heading towards similar threshold effects with a lot of species in the North Sea. The specific question that was raised was - how can we NOT learn from that example and just keep fishing in a way that most certainly will lead to the same results in the North Sea?
In my mind the answer is probably a combination of bad policy, short-sightedness, greed and, especially for us consumers, ignorance and the fact that most of us seem to have a hard time identifying with things we can't see (see land trawling). People should be outraged that this is going on - it is bad for everyone! And according to Hanne, our marine biologist onboard, the fishermen could even catch more than today in just couple of years if the all fishing was sustainable and there were marine reserves in place in the most sensitive areas.
I also find it rather funny that this is the most common teaching example when you learn about the "prisoners' dilemma" - individual fishermen pondering how much fish they should take out of the lake they are all fishing from. If just one or a few landed as much as they could, that person would make a lot more money than the others, and since it's a good lake the fish population in the lake would still be ok. But, since it's "rational" for all of them to fish as much as they can no matter what the others do (it's what the game theorists call a dominant strategy), everyone goes all out - and after the season is over they are all out of business. Even if they could coordinate their fishing and promise each other not to over-fish they can't know that the others would keep their promises and the ones that do keep them risk making less money and still be put out of business if most of the others decide to break theirs. To avoid an endless regression of promises they could of course let an outside entity, like a governmental agency, perhaps even an international one, be responsible for making sure that there are good rules and quotas that keep the fish stocks healthy and sees to it that everyone sticks to them.
Consequently, the problem of over-fishing is not that it's hard to understand but that we have a system that makes it rational. What we need is a new system that instead makes it rational to keep our oceans healthy and productive. We need the European Union to shape up and get a grip on today's irrational situation.
