uropeans had been coming to fish off North America for centuries. After the Second World War the famed Grand Banks truly became an international fishing ground as fishers from more than two dozen nations came regularly to join with Canadians and Americans in search of a variety of fish species. However, in the rush to harvest the natural resource, the fishing nations didn't realize that the ocean's bounty was limited. Several attempts were made to develop a fishery which would have allowed harvesting the resource without destroying it for future generations. However, the current state of the fishery tells a sad tale. With a moratorium on fishing most of the species in Canadian waters and huge cuts in the quotas for the stocks outside Canada's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, it is clear that many fishing nations failed to protect the fish stocks. The Canadian confrontation with Spain early in 1995 to protect the turbot stocks demonstrates the continued serious challenges to sustainable development.

he Norse had explored and wintered in North America some 500 years before Giovanni Caboto, a Genoese explorer whom the British called John Cabot, rediscovered the land in 1497. Although Cabot failed to find a northern route to the rich spice trade in Asia, he returned with tales of an ocean teeming with cod and gave Europeans a reason to turn their attention to the North Atlantic. Cabot had discovered the series of submarine plateaus, called banks, that rise from the continental shelf off Canada's east coast, and are an important spawning and breeding ground for a variety of fish. The Gadus Morhua, better known as the Atlantic cod, has for centuries been the most important species. Though the cod and the beaver attracted international attention as valuable resources at roughly the same time, the cod never achieved the honoured status of the beaver as a national symbol. Nevertheless, the lowly cod played an important role in the expansion of Europe, led to the exploration and settlement of Canada and, until recently, provided a major source of protein.

It was Portugal and not England that first took a keen interest in the fishery off Newfoundland. Spain and France soon joined in the annual voyages to the New World for cod; by 1550, more than 400 ships and 12,000 fishers came annually to fish. The first fishers came ashore just for water and firewood, but two different methods of obtaining the fish eventually emerged: an inshore fishery where the fish were taken in small boats very close to the shore, and an offshore or bank fishery, where the fish were caught in distant waters. There were also two ways of preserving the catch to return it to Europe in an edible state: the wet or green salted fishery and the dry cure. All fishing was migratory, with fishers arriving early in the year and returning at the end of the season. Salting and drying remained the only way of preserving cod until icing and refrigeration became widespread in the 20th century.

The fishing industry played an important role in the early modern European economy as cod, high in protein and easily preserved, soon replaced herring and salmon as the staple fish. Religious doctrine forbidding the consumption of meat on Fridays and Holy Days further increased the demand for cod throughout Catholic Europe. Dried cod also became an important staple for sailors and the increasingly large and mobile armies of the European Great Powers. And, the fishery provided an ideal training ground for the navies of the period. Not surprisingly, as cod became a strategic national resource, the power struggles of Europe soon carried over into the North American fishery. The British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch often clashed over fishing rights in the waters that would later be called Canadian. War became a common feature of the New World fishery.

By the beginning of the 17th century, Britain and France had emerged as the dominant players in the international fishery off the east coast of North America. Though Spain and Portugal had been largely driven from the area by the British navy, fishers from New England soon ventured to the waters around Canada. In 1713, France was forced to remove its settlers from Newfoundland when it recognized the English claim to the island. Its fishers, however, retained the right to catch and dry fish on the west and north coasts of Newfoundland, an area that became known as the Treaty or French Shore. The fishery was paramount in the Seven Years War (1756-63) when France and England fought for control of North America. When Duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister, offered to surrender Canada to the British in 1761, he refused to cede French rights to the Newfoundland fishery. The British Prime Minister, William Pitt, was determined to end France's privileges in the fishery, even telling Parliament that he would rather lose his right arm than allow France continued participation in the fishery. Choiseul countered that he would rather be stoned in the streets of Paris than surrender France's North American fishery rights. When peace came in 1763, France surrendered its North American possessions, including Canada and Cape Breton, without any sense of "grevious loss," but retained its right to catch and dry fish in northern Newfoundland. It also acquired the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon as shelter for its bank fleet. France continues to retain certain fishing privileges in Canadian waters as had the United States for much of the 20th century.

From the late 15th century through to the mid-19th, change came slowly to the fishing industry. By the 1840s, the British migratory fishery had come to an end as the trade passed to branches of English fish merchants operating from ports in Newfoundland. The French continued their migratory fishery and were responsible for many of the technological innovations that changed the industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. They introduced the bultow, or trawl fishing, to replace the traditional handline used from the deck of vessels. The bultow was simply long lines of several hundred metres with hundreds of baited hooks attached at regular intervals. The line was set or moored on the sea floor by fishers operating from chaloupes and flat-bottomed craft called dories. Though more efficient than the simple hook and line method, trawl fishing was widely criticised for catching too many fish and destroying the stocks. Nevertheless, fishers from New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland soon adopted this technique as did the Spanish and Portuguese.

The introduction of the steam engine early in the 20th century allowed fishers to use more complicated and effective catching technologies. The sailing ships were gradually replaced by steamers, followed quickly thereafter by larger and more efficient crafts such as side trawlers, stern trawlers and, later, factory freezer trawlers. As the fishing vessels changed and became more effective, so did the gear. Soon fishers were able to fish in any type of weather, and, in fact, some of the vessels rarely left the fishing grounds as crews rotated and freighters transported the finished product to market. Moreover, as the catching capacity increased, many countries involved in the international fishery increased the number of vessels they sent to the fishing grounds. In most industries, technological improvements allowed for fewer processors and fewer workers, often with improved productivity. This was not so in the fishery where the number of vessels continued to increase despite greater productivity. Many nations realized that the ocean offered a cheaper source of protein than they could harvest from the land. They regarded the oceans' fisheries as an international industry with a free and open resource, one that no country could legitimately claim.

After the First World War, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishers continued to fish on the Grand Banks alongside Americans, Canadians, and Newfoundlanders. Many of the Europeans who came to fish on the Grand Banks were encouraged to do so by bounties paid by their home governments. In the late 1940s, Spanish fishers on the Grand Banks began using pair-trawling, a most effective method of fishing where a large net was towed by two vessels. The Portuguese, on the other hand, ignored much of the technology and returned to the traditional line fishery, carried on from one-man, 5-metre dories.

In March 1954, the first factory freezer trawler and the first commercial stern trawler, the Fairtry, representing the latest in fishing technology, was launched from a shipyard in Scotland and dispatched to the Grand Banks. The Fairtry retrieved its nets by pulling them up a ramp at the stern of the ship rather than over the side as the older otter trawlers had. This allowed the vessel to use larger nets and to fish in almost any weather. The ship was equipped with a quick-freezing facility, automated filleting machines, cold-storage units, and a fish reduction unit.

Meanwhile, state planners in the Soviet Union decided to increase the nation's protein supply through fishing. They quickly replicated the Fairtry and had, by the 1960s, constructed the country's own fleet of factory freezer trawlers. The Soviets approached fishing as they might a military campaign. After reconnaissance ships determined that an area was commercially viable, the whole fleet, including numerous modern factory-freezer stern trawlers and a large number of smaller trawlers, were deployed in the area. A mother, or factory ship, accompanied the fleet to process the catch of the smaller trawlers. One of the vessels in the Soviet fleet was the Professor Baranov, a factory ship 165 metres in length that processed the catch of a fleet of 20 trawlers, each between 40 and 50 metres long. In a single day, it could salt 200 tonnes of herring, reduce 150 tonnes of fish and offal into fish meal, fillet and freeze 100 tonnes of ground fish, manufacture 5 tonnes of fish oil, produce 20 tonnes of ice and distill 100 tonnes of water. Moreover, fuel tankers, salvage tugs, refrigerated transport ships, and floating repair shops accompanied the Soviet fleet.

By the mid-1960s the West and East Germans, Poles, Romanians, Norwegians, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Greeks, Japanese, Cubans, and Koreans had come to join the Soviets, Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Canadians on the Grand Banks. The West Germans earned a reputation for finding the fish with the aid of sophisticated electronic equipment and, in 1969, perfected the mid-water trawl which allowed a vessel to tow its nets at any depth. Some of the mid-water trawls were 300 metres long, the length of three football fields, and used underwater sonars which were able to scan the ocean for up to three kilometres, making the net very effective. Soon all of the fishing nations were using the new technology.

ach fishing craft that sailed to the Grand Banks, regardless of nationality, wanted to maximize its catch and make every voyage as profitable as possible. The cod and other species were, unfortunately, no match for the mighty efficiency of the new technology. Even after controls were put in place to protect the fish stocks, too many fishers, often with the support of their governments, continued to pursue the fish with little regard for the rules. The result, of course, was a collapse of fish stocks in the waters off Canada's east coast. Although some members of the scientific community believed that the resources in the oceans were infinite, others were warning as early as the 1920s of the consequences of overfishing. In fact, as early as the 18th century, people understood that there were limits to the number of fish that could be caught in a given area. The traditional response to poor catches was to move to unsettled and unexploited areas in search of new stocks; but further geographical expansion was not an option in the 20th century.

Consequently, by 1920 Canada, Newfoundland and the United States began to recognize the importance of conservation, especially after their haddock stocks were overfished. By the late 1930s, most fishing nations feared that other stocks might be threatened without tough conservation measures for the entire North Atlantic. Despite this realization, little was achieved; there were simply too many nations with too many different interests to adopt a common strategy. However, following the Second World War, there developed a widespread belief in the benefits of internationalism, perhaps inspired by the creation of the United Nations. Finally, in a spirit of cooperation rare among the fishing nations, 11 countries met in January 1949 to create the International Convention for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF) for management and conservation of the fish stocks.

Unfortunately, ICNAF had only the authority to recommend; it had no power to enforce its regulatory measures. It soon became clear that the organization was ill-equipped to deal with the tremendous increase in fishing in the Northwest Atlantic. Even as ICNAF scientists warned repeatedly that cod and haddock stocks were seriously threatened, calls for a catch limit were ignored. Not until 1970 was ICNAF given the authority to set limits for some species with a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) based on the concept of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) -- the maximum amount of fish that could be taken from a stock without depleting it. It was 1974 before ICNAF could set TACs for most species of fish. Even then, ICNAF still considered economic factors as well as biological ones in establishing its quota, which meant that TACs were usually set too high. Moreover, many of the fishing nations ignored ICNAF regulations by invoking a 1964 Protocol to the ICNAF Convention which allowed members who lodged a formal objection to ignore the Commission's conservation measures.

ven while working within ICNAF, Canada and other coastal nations adopted a more aggressive role to claim and manage the fish stocks in the waters off their shores. Canada extended its territorial sea to 12 miles in 1970 and it unilaterally declared a 200-mile economic zone in 1977 after the Third Law of the Sea Conference failed to reach an agreement on the rights of coastal nations. Although Canada claimed jurisdiction over most of the fish stocks on the east coast, the continental shelf extended beyond the 200-mile limit and several important stocks remained outside Canada's control.

Though the 200-mile limit and a new regulatory regime were intended to conserve and restore fish stocks, they often resulted in a larger domestic fishing fleets. Consequently, there was a dramatic increase in Canadian groundfish catches after 1977, following a reduction in foreign fishing. Canada's share of the catch reached 73% in 1979, up by more than 21% over the 1977 level. In Newfoundland, the number of registered fishers had increased by 41%, registered vessels by 23%, and the total catch by 27% by 1981. In fact, Canadian fish processing companies had begun lining up before the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as early as 1974 with proposals to charter foreign vessels in anticipation of the 200-mile limit and/or increased quotas resulting from ICNAF decisions.

Even as the yields reached an historic high on the east coast in 1986, the World Commission on Environment and Development, the Brundtland Commission, warned that the world's oceans were in trouble as overfishing threatened most of the familiar fish stocks. In fact, Canadian scientists advised the government of Canada in 1980 to implement a total ban on fishing capelin and cod on the Grand Banks. The advice was not implemented at that time. Moreover, some members of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), formed in 1979 to replace ICNAF, were dissatisfied with their quotas inside Canada's 200-mile zone. They turned to the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks outside the 200-mile limit and registered their vessels in non-NAFO countries to avoid following international rules. The areas outside Canada's jurisdiction were important spawning and nursery grounds for a variety of species. Between 1986 and 1991 non-NAFO vessels allegedly caught more than 200,000 tonnes of fish in these areas. Moreover, from 1986 to 1992, the European Union set quotas for itself, and its reported catches were five times the NAFO quota.

Foreign fishing fleets surely played an important role in the devastation of the cod stocks, but Canada must also share a portion of the blame. While Canada criticized the overfishing by foreign fleets, it also ignored warnings from both its own scientists and an independent review of the northern cod stocks indicating that the resource was in trouble and fishing should be reduced. Canada and other NAFO member states maintained their quotas, fearing the massive unemployment that would have resulted from shutting down the industry. By 1992, with the survival of many of the fish stocks in serious question, the Canadian government initiated major quota reductions that effectively closed much of the fishing industry in eastern Canada. In 1994, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, introduced the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act which empowered the Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers to board and arrest foreign vessels that violated conservation measures. NAFO eventually agreed to a partial ban on some stocks, but as the Canadian arrest of a Spanish trawler early in 1995 demonstrates, some fishing nations are still uncommitted to the principle of sustainable development.

hile the ecological disaster in the east coast fishery has captured most of the headlines in Canada, the west coast salmon fishery has also experienced its share of trouble. The lucrative salmon fishery, which in 1994 was worth $450 million, has also been threatened by overfishing. The Canadian salmon fleet has become all too efficient as vessels grow in size and adopt better technologies. In 1972, for instance, it took the seine boats 51 days to harvest their quota; in 1994 it took less that four days, even with an increased catch allowance. The Americans, particularly the 2,500-vessel Alaskan fleet, have been blamed for much of the overfishing of the west coast salmon; this claim has touched off a fishing dispute with the United States. The west coast salmon fishery has also positioned Natives and non-natives against each other, after the Supreme Court ruled that Aboriginals had the right to catch fish for food and ceremonial purposes. Native people want to play a larger role in the fishery that once sustained their culture.

hen John Cabot stopped on the Grand Banks in 1497, the cod were so plentiful that he caught them in a basket. Later, his son, Sebastian, claimed that the fish "stayed" his vessel. Of course, this is all myth, but the fish were plentiful and Europeans came to fill their ships with cod. The fishery off Canada's east coast has attracted fishers from nearly two dozen nations as recently as the late 1970s. It has provided employment for thousands of fishers, and supplied food and protein to millions of people. This resource has virtually disappeared in a few short years.

What went wrong? Why have the cod and so many other species been fished to the point of extinction? There is more than enough blame to be shared by all the fishing nations, but the disaster may be summed up in three words -- protein, profit and plunder. The fishing nations were greedy and overfished the stocks as they ignored the regulations that they themselves had put in place to maintain a sustainable fishery. Technology became devastatingly efficient, though we cannot blame the ecological disaster on technology. The blame must be shared by governments, fish processing companies, and fishers. Governments refused to implement tough conservation measures despite the mounting evidence of declining yields. Fish processor companies were driven by profits, and fishers, who wanted only the best quality fish, often underreported catches and discarded smaller fish as they sought to maximize the dollar value of each voyage to the fishing ground. The resulting devastation of the groundfish fisheries in Atlantic Canada has thrown thousands of people out of work. Today, we can only hope that the social dislocation caused by the collapse of the fishery will send a strong message to all involved in the exploitation of natural resources. Trusting to luck is not an option. Sustainable development requires disciplined cooperation and international responsibility.