The cod is gone: the rest is next

Just beyond the 200-mile limit of Canada's waters, an estimated 60 percent of the world's high-seas bottom trawling takes place. 

Bottom trawling is the equivalent to clear-cutting the ocean floor: giant nets, the size of football pitches are weighted across the bottom with heavy steel rollers that indiscriminately smash and crush cold-water corals, sponge forests, and other bottom-dwelling life, swallowing everything in their path. 

The fish these trawlers are seeking are only a small fraction of the life they destroy -- unwanted "bycatch" is simply thrown overboard.  Imagine using a bulldozer to destroy an entire forest just to catch a few rabbits: that's the kind of indiscriminate destruction we're talking about.

The destruction of deep-sea life in international waters off the east coast of Canada is especially troubling because, unlike most other international waters, there is a regulatory body in place to regulate high-seas bottom trawling in that area: NAFO, the North Atlantic Fisheries Organisation.

But according to Bruce Cox, Executive Director of Greenpeace Canada, NAFO "is bound by red tape, has little punishment for member countries... and it turns a blind eye frequently to infractions of their own rules."

A highly critical Greenpeace report cites failure after failure by the regulatory body to stop overfishing and destructive fishing practices: the collapse of Canada's cod fisheries in 1992 is the most infamous example.

"Without radical changes, Regional Fisheries Management Organisations such as NAFO will be unable to protect deep sea biodiversity and will continue to struggle to sustainably manage their fisheries," said Martin Willison, a marine scientist at Dalhousie University.

Canadian Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan responded to the report by telling The Canadian Press that "NAFO needs to change," but he stopped short of committing to advocate for a moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling. He doesn't seem to think that any fishing method is inherently destructive -- perhaps he should look at the huge 500 year-old piece of coral we documented being pulled up in the nets of a New Zealand bottom trawler just last month.

"Countries like Costa Rica, Germany, Chile, Austria, Belgium have all moved toward the call for a moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling," notes our Oceans Campaigner Bunny McDiarmid. "Even the fishing industry itself concedes that this is the most damaging of all fishing methods."

We think Canada should rethink its position. And we're sending the Greenpeace ship Esperanza to the Grand Banks to show the Canadian public precisely why.

You can follow the efforts of the Esperanza over the next few weeks as the ship documents the destruction, by checking in on the  Defending the Deep Shipblog.

But in the meantime, please join the call for a moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling. Give bottom trawlers the (fish) finger.