New England Fishing Industry

• Main Author: James J. Corbett
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: An Overview of Cod Fishing Regulations; Implications for the; Griffith; Yankee; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.664.9487; http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/27136/1/35010051.pdf

Years of overfishing and mismanagement have dras-tically reduced the cod population in New England waters, threatening Boston’s reputation as the home of the bean and the cod (Knudson 1994). In 1994 the Commerce Department moved to prohibit commer-cial fishing in 6,600 square miles of Georges Bank and other areas, effectively closing 17 % of the total fishing area off the coast of New England, in a move designed to protect rapidly depleting stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder (Noah 1994). The resilience of groundfish stocks has Yankee fisher-men champing at the bit, however; regulators say recovery is fragile, but harvesters balk at increas-ingly severe restrictions (Fraser 2001). The situation facing the world’s fishing industry has many similarities with the problems associated with industrialized agriculture. As highly mecha-nized production techniques displace traditional, proven methods, multinationals are taking an even greater proportion of fishing capacity (Griffith 2003). New England, like any coastal corner of the world, has tended to view the problem of declining fish stocks through the lens of the fluctuating hauls brought back by boats working out of the region’s harbors. Just how limited this perspective can be is demonstrated by the galvanizing study published in the May 2003 issue of the journal Nature reporting that stocks of big ocean fish like tuna and swordfish have declined by 90 percent since World War II (The Boston Globe 2003). Over the last five decades, commercial fishing has extracted a heavy toll on economically impor-tant species of fish including tuna, swordfish, marlin, halibut, and cod (The Springfield Republican 2003). For many years fisherman have considered cod the most important food fish found in the waters of the North Atlantic (Pierce 1989). Historically—but not in recent years, because of overfishing—the cod stock off of Massachusetts was the largest and meatiest in the world (Kurlansky 1997).