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The dead sea cells
Paul Brown on the industrialised greed that brought an end to the harvest of the deep
The Guardian
17th May 2003
In the spring of 1954, a new Scottish fishing boat appeared in the Grand Banks fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland. The Fairtry was no ordinary vessel: at 280ft long and with a gross weight of 2,600 tons, it was more than four times the size of the largest trawlers it began fishing alongside.
With a superstructure like an ocean liner, its aft deck was packed with winches and gear of an unprecedented scale, but the most striking thing about the Fairtry was the enormous ramp at the stern, similar to the chutes used by whaling ships to drag on board the 190-ton carcasses of blue whales. But the ramp was there to handle a different but equally large load: gigantic nets full of cod. The era of factory fishing had arrived, and the Atlantic cod fishery, the most bountiful the world had ever known, was doomed from that moment.
Five centuries before the launch of the Fairtry, the Genoese explorer John Cabot had stumbled across the fisheries off the coast of Canada as he attempted to find a new route to the spice riches of the Orient. The waters were so teeming with codfish, he reported, that to catch them all his men had to do was hang a wicker basket over the side of the ship and it would come up laden. A century later, the fishing was still going strong. English skippers talked about cod shoals "so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them". Some fish were six or seven feet long and weighed up to 200lbs.
The rich harvest continued until the arrival of the Fairtry. The distant-water factory trawlers were ruthlessly efficient. Equipped with increasingly sophisticated technology - sonar, radar, echograms - they could locate and catch entire schools of fish with ease. Below decks were on-board processing plants and huge banks of freezers to keep their catch fresh while they continued pursuing fish around the clock, in all weathers, for months on end. Every major fishing nation got in on this action. By the 1970s, the Soviets had 400 factory trawlers, the Japanese had 125, Spain had 75 and France and Britain had 40. And the trawlers were getting bigger, exceeding 8,000 tons in weight.
According to Canadian fisheries scientists Jeffrey Hutchings and Ransom Myers, it took the factory fleets just 15 years to match the 8m tons of cod caught in these waters between Cabot's arrival in 1497 and 1750. The boats were hoovering up cod many times faster than they could replenish themselves. And it wasn't just cod; stocks of other groundfish such as flounder, halibut and haddock were decimated. Industrial fishing meant the strip mining of the seas.
In 1968, the catch peaked at 810,000 tons and then started dropping. In 1992, nature finally caught up. Scientific monitoring revealed that the estimated combined weight of the adult cod population had plummeted to just 1.1% of the 1960s levels. Left with little choice, the Canadian government announced the closure of the seemingly inexhaustible Grand Banks cod fishery. The aim was to give the cod some breathing space in the hope that they would recover. A decade on, there are signs that they may never do so.
Scientists now believe that the massive bottom-trawling nets of the factory boats have not only wiped out the fish stocks but also the entire eco-system of the seabed on which the cod relied. Each time a net passes over the seabed, it rips up boulders, plants and structure-building organisms. The factory trawlers may also have changed the ecology of the seabed forever.
The destruction is not limited to the Grand Banks. According to WWF - formerly the Worldwide Fund for Nature - over 70%of fish stocks are either fully exploited or over exploited, while 40 out of 60 commercial fish stocks in the north east Atlantic are being fished unsustainably. Since the peak year of 1989, harvests have been going inexorably downwards. There is almost nothing left in the North, Irish, Baltic or Bering Seas. In Europe, only Iceland has a decent sustainable catch.
But this has not stopped the onward march of the factory trawlers. Now fish are so scarce that it is worth chasing them wherever they are, be it Africa or Antarctica. As fishing grounds have been closed and quotas slashed, the boats have simply changed course. The waters off the West African states of Mauritania and Somalia, for example, have provided fish for the coastal communities for centuries; now they are the hunting ground for European factory fleets, such as the 21 boats operated by member companies of the Dutch marketing conglomerate known simply as "The Group". The boats continue to grow too: one of the Dutch super trawlers, the Helen Mary, is 350ft long and is capable of catching 98,000 tons of fish in just 50 days. Up against these satellite-guided giants, the fish have no chance. Tuna, monkfish and skate have now joined cod on the Marine Conservation Society's list of the top 20 most endangered species.
As wild fish become increasingly scarce, a growing slice of the fishmongers slab is being taken up by farmed fish. Modern commercial fish farming on a big scale is relatively recent and has transformed salmon from an occasional luxury to frequently the cheapest fish on offer. Sea bass are farmed in the Mediterranean and other fish now of higher value, including cod, are farmed in the Shetlands and Norway.
But intensive fish farms have created serious environmental problems. Sea lice have spread from farmed fish to wild stocks, driving the species they were designed to save to the brink of extinction. In the wild fisheries of north-west Scotland, heartland of the British aquaculture industry, salmon and sea trout have been found with up to 500 lice on them, which cause horrific damage, eating the fish from the outside in. The lice problem in the farm cages has led to inappropriate use of organophosphates, killing large areas of seabed. Escaped farmed salmon mix with and damage the genetic make up of wild fish, previously distinct to individual river basins.
Faeces from fish farms sometimes blanket the sea bottom, along with feed that drops straight through the cages. It is estimated that a 1,000-tonne salmon farm - small by current industry standards - produces sewage waste equivalent to a town of 20,000 people. According to WWF, pollution from fish farms on the west coast of Scotland is comparable to the sewage input of up to 9.4m people, nutrifying the surrounding waters and destroying delicate marine habitats. Marine biologists say siting farms at the mouths of deep sea lochs is a major problem because there is not enough tidal flush to remove the pollutants and sweep them out to sea. One has likened it to flushing your toilet once every two weeks, or in some cases once every two years.
The United National Food and Agricultural Organisation believes that by 2020 more than half the world's fish will come from farms. But this is unlikely to mean a respite for wild stocks. Nearly all the highly valued fish eat smaller fish and species like sand eels and shrimps. In order to make the food pellets which feed the farmed fish "industrial" fishing boats literally vacuum the seas of sand eels, sprats, anchovies, sardines and other lesser species. It takes four tonnes of industrial fish to make a tonne of pellets for a fish farm to feed salmon. The pillaging which began with the launch of the Fairtry is certain to continue.
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