Canada Bans N. Atlantic Cod Fishing for 2 Years

Canada on Thursday declared a two-year ban on the fishing of cod in a vast area off this country’s eastern shore.

The drastic move, announced by fisheries minister John Crosbie, promised to save the severely depleted northern cod, once the backbone of the North American fast-food industry, from “commercial extinction.” But it also threatened to throw out of work about 20,000 fishermen, fish packers and others in Newfoundland province.

“This situation is really unprecedented in modern Canada,” said Fred Morley, an economist with the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a Halifax, Nova Scotia, think tank. He said he could not think of a region being so devastated since the Depression-era dust bowl on the Canadian prairies.

Fistfights broke out at the hotel in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Crosbie announced the ban, as angry fishermen tried but failed to break down the door and police struggled to haul them away.

Even without taking Crosbie’s new cod-fishing ban into account, Newfoundland is one of Canada’s most remote and impoverished provinces, with an estimated unemployment rate of 20%. Its soil is rocky, its climate harsh, its transportation links with the mainland poor. Few economists see cheap and easy ways of diversifying its fishing-based economy.

Ever since Crosbie hinted last month that some sort of moratorium was in the works, businesses and banks in Newfoundland have girded themselves for a wave of bankruptcies. Unemployment is expected to rise to 25%. There is even talk of the forced relocation of fishermen from their tiny, isolated coastal villages, called “outports.”

Crosbie said the government would provide a multimillion-dollar aid package for the soon-to-be-unemployed fishermen and plant workers. It is to include direct payments of $200 or so weekly, fishing license buybacks, early retirement settlements and maintenance payments for idled boats.

But the financial-aid package only provoked rage from the fishermen. “People will not stop fishing” unless the package is sweetened, threatened fishermen’s union leader Richard Cashin. “It will be like a strike in reverse.”

The government’s all-out ban on catching cod comes after years of scientific studies saying the northern cod stocks--once so rich that the bottom-feeding fish looked from the surface like paving stones on the seabed--were in desperate shape.