Canada Slashes Cod Quota in Fishing Crisis

Canada on Monday slashed the number of cod that may be legally caught off its once-rich eastern coast and said it will step up diplomatic pressure on European trawlers it accused of “destroying a major food stock for mankind.”

The government will allow a catch of only 120,000 metric tons for 1992, a 35% decline from previous projections. Even that was less of a reduction than a Canadian scientific panel called for in a study released last week.

But Canadian Fisheries Minister John Crosbie said he hopes that the cut will be enough to let the vanishing cod--a mainstay of the American fast-food industry--replenish themselves. “We have been in this area before, and the fishery has recovered,” he said at a news conference.

Canada laid partial blame for a massive decline in the cod stocks on hungry seals and said it will promote the renewal of Newfoundland’s traditional seal hunt. Seal hunting has been virtually shut down by environmentalists and animal-rights groups. They vociferously protested it as a cruel, needless slaughter of helpless wildlife.

Newfoundland fishermen say that ever since the seal hunt was brought to a standstill, the fish-eating mammals have had few predators and their numbers have multiplied sharply.

Fishing-industry unions reacted with anger to the government’s quota cuts, which are expected to throw thousands of trawler crews and fish processors out of work in the impoverished province of Newfoundland. About 31,000 jobs in Canada’s four hard-pressed Atlantic provinces depend on fishing; 9 of 10 of those jobs are in Newfoundland, an island province with poor topsoil, a short growing season, difficult transportation links with the rest of Canada and poor prospects for conversion to other sources of revenue.

Newfoundland has already been rocked in recent weeks by massive layoffs at a large fish-processing plant and by delays at its Hibernia offshore-oil megaproject.

Small-scale independent fishermen in Atlantic Canada have complained for years that it has become nearly impossible to catch enough cod to make a decent living. And scientists have warned that the cod population is shrinking so fast that the species might go into “commercial extinction,” when there would still be cod but not in commercially useful quantities.

Besides blaming seals for eating cod, the small-scale Newfoundland fishermen have accused Canada’s large trawling companies of disrupting the fish spawning grounds and making it difficult for the species to reproduce. The companies have argued back that the small-scale fishermen are crying wolf and that cod are still “out there” in great numbers.

Canada places part of the blame for the declining cod population on large Spanish and Portuguese vessels that, officials say, recklessly overfish the waters just outside the 200-mile offshore zone over which Canada claims jurisdiction.