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This is the human side of an environmental disaster. The cod collapse devastated entire communities in Newfoundland, leaving most people with no other skills to fall back on. Today, sustained only by government assistance, fishermen fester with helpless anger: How did we let the cod die?

"The cod stocks failed because of greed," says Dr. Richard Haedrich, a respected fisheries biologist at Newfoundland's Memorial University, "People wanted all the money they could get out of the fish."

After greed, the answer gets more complex, involving a tangle of government rivalries and scientific arrogance. In the end, the cod were defeated by fishermen who became too good at fishing, scientists who ignored what they didn't know and politicians who refused to make the tough decisions - until it was too late.

By the time Canada's fisheries minister John Crosbie closed the northern cod fishery in July 1992 and threw 40,000 Canadians out of their $500-million a year industry, decades of over-fishing had decimated the ground fish stocks and virtually emptied one of the most bountiful areas of the Atlantic. At the time, Mr. Crosbie tried to pacify fishermen by saying the moratorium would be over in two years. Not twelve months passed and Mr. Crosbie was forced to amend his overly optimistic time line: it would be at least half a decade before the cod returned. Six years later, the cod stocks remain at the lowest level observed in history - what one senior fisheries bureaucrat termed "a calamity of almost biblical proportions." More recently, cod was listed as "vulnerable" on Canada's endangered species list.

The collapse of the North Atlantic cod is a tragedy with few innocents. Fishermen, both offshore and inshore, were guilty of misreportlng their catches, of swarming the cod on spawning grounds, of dumping tonnes of unwanted fish overboard to rot on the ocean floor. The days of the radar and high-tech trawlers - both foreign and domestic - meant that entire schools of fish could be easily hunted down and sucked out of the Atlantic.

Scientists, meanwhile, consistently overestimated the size of the stocks. Fisheries science, at best, is imprecise. Too little is known about the nature of the cod and its relationship to the ocean food chain, predators like seals, and temperature changes. But scientists relied too heavily on offshore catch rates for population estimates, and confused efficient, modern fishing with what was really happening in the ocean. With the scientists guessing too high, fishermen slashed a far larger portion of the cod biomass than the quotas intended.

"They weren't fishing what was produced," says Dr. Haedrich, "They were fishing what was producing. Scientists never admitted how great the uncertainty was and when decisions were made they fell on the side of what was favourable economically, rather than what was conservative ecologically. Nobody stuck up for the fish."

Protecting the cod fell to the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But even when government scientists warned in the late 1980s that the stocks were in trouble, politicians in Ottawa hesitated to lower quotas and slice into the fishermen's income. The industry was already indirectly subsidized, crowded with fish processing and canning workers and fishermen who work for several weeks and then claim unemployment insurance for the rest of the year. Catching less fish would mean hardship particularly for the people in Newfoundland who have few other employment options. It would force layoffs - and the possible closure - of fish plants. Faced with this reality and intense lobbying from provincial politicians to maintain the fishery, the government in Ottawa set quotas based on social and economic factors, not science.

Today, in the out ports of Newfoundland, fishermen forced into poverty have begun to give up. Many of them no longer expect to see the cod return in their lifetime. They talk about selling their licences back to Ottawa and walking away from the sea for good - a painful step for people who thought they'd fish forever.

The moratorium, says Newfoundland fishermen Wilfred Williams, "destroyed everything I ever worked for. I made my living from the sea all my working life - where am I going to turn?"

RELATED ARTICLE: Curbing the mighty shrimp

With "prawn farm is prison farm" as his slogan, S. Jagannathan led thousands of India's poor farmers and fishers in a seven-year struggle to ban the country's lucrative shrimp industry - a Herculean feat as India is one of the world's top producers. Despite outbreaks of police violence, passive resistance groups rallied the support of environmental and consumer groups at home and abroad before convincing the Indian Supreme Court that people's fundamental rights had been violated by the industry.

"While millions of people were denied a square meal a day, the country was being forced to produce shrimp for the affluent abroad," says Jagannathan, an 85-year-old disciple of Gandhi. "Even as the government was withdrawing subsidies from the farmers, hundreds of millions of rupees were given as loans and subsidies to big business entering shrimp farming."

With fish stocks plummeting, aquaculture had been hailed as a godsend, particularly for developing countries interested in a new cash crop. Investors streamed into India's coastal states like Tamil Nadu, where the area under shrimp cultivation rose from 250 hectares in 1991 to 2,000 in 1995 and production grew from 450 to 3,000 tonnes.

Suddenly, local communities found the "outsiders" (shrimp cultivators) alienating them from the land they had depended on for generations. At the same time, saltwater and chemicals used for fertilizer and feed were seeping out of the vast ponds of brackish water used to grow the shrimp. The run-off and salinization damaged crop lands, mangroves, drinking water and groundwater aquifers. The brackish water ponds also drained fresh water supplies as saline levels rose with evaporation. "To raise one tonne of shrimps requires 50 to 60 million litres of water, half of which is fresh water," says Bisham Gujja of the World Wide Fund for Nature. In addition, about million cubic metres of effluent were discharged off the east coast daily.

Presented with these reports, the Supreme Court ruled in December 1996 that virtually all shrimp farms within 500 metres of the high tide line had to be closed by 31 March 1997 and a new aquaculture authority was to apply the "polluter pays" principle. However, farms continue to operate through 'flimsy technical arguments", says Gujja. "But investors have pulled out of the industry. Even if the law is amended, aquaculture in India will never be the same because investors will be careful to follow environmental regulations and avoid displacing people - at least, that is what the hope is."

.T.

RELATED ARTICLE: Waste and want

Some 200 million people work in fishing worldwide (industrial and self-employed combined), while as many as 500 million depend on the oceans indirectly through jobs in tourism, shipping, oil and gas and other aspects of the fishing industry. In 1996 seafood production, including aquaculture, was valued at $120 billion. Half the world's catch is exported, especially to the developed countries, which absorb 80% of imports in value. One billion people depend on the sea for their main source of food every day. Global export earnings from fishing exceed those from coffee, tea, cocoa and sugar. But post-catch losses are very high, precisely in those places where the need is greatest. In Africa, losses to self-employed fishermen due to poor unloading, transport and packaging conditions, as well as the hot climate, range from 25% to 50% of the catch.

Aquaculture is booming. Farmed fish production tripled over the last decade, reaching 230 million tonnes in 1996. Farmed salmon output rose from around 34,000 to 300,000 tonnes, shrimp from 50,000 to 720,000 tonnes. Shrimp production has increased six-fold in Asia and Central America. Aquaculture already meets 20% of world demand for seafood and could grow by another 70% between now and 2010. The problem is, instead of reducing food shortages the industry invests in the production of expensive seafood that only those in developed countries can afford. What is more, since most of the farmed species are carnivorous, aquaculture consumes huge amounts of animal protein that would go to much better use on children's plates.

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