Five hundred years after John Cabot blundered onto the Grand Banks while looking for Asia, Canada still takes a heck of a lot of fish out of the ocean.
That was my first thought after sharing lunch this week with Susanna Fuller, the 43-year old wunderkind who co-authored the One Nova Scotia Report with Ray Ivany and John Bragg.
I caught up to Fuller, a PhD in marine biology from Dalhousie, after she co-wrote a recently-released 150-page report entitled Canada’s Marine Fisheries: Status, Recovery Potential and Pathways to Success.
The report was sponsored by the U.S.-based lobby group Oceana, which says the world’s oceans can feed a billion or so people if we take care of habitat and harvest seafood sustainably.
Fuller and her co-author (Julia Baum of the University of Victoria) want Canada to get better at protecting fisheries resources and habitat.
The stakes are high.
In 2014, Canadian fleets harvested 830,000 metric tons of fish with a landed value approaching $3 billion.
The Fuller-Baum report says the traditional fishing industry (harvesting and processing wild fish) remains the largest private sector employer in Atlantic Canada.
The Nova Scotia fishing sector remains best in class among Canadian provinces. It holds more than 5,600 licences and employs more than 20,000 people.
Five centuries after Cabot, these numbers make me wonder why we go gaga over the latest IT start-up whose hipster owners want to sell the business to a Silicon Valley firm 18 months after launch.
But that’s another story and Fuller’s in another world. A practical environmentalist, she asks the right question: how do we grow this industry sustainably? (Instead of the wrong one: how do we stop it in its tracks?)
In the fishery, we should be answering the right question by assessing stock health.
That’s not as easy as it sounds. Fuller and Baum practically had to dive into the palimpsest archives to figure out the status of Canadian fish stocks. Only long-buried, useless data could be disinterred on 40 stocks. Less than a quarter of the remaining 125 marine fish and invertebrate stocks were considered healthy by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).
How to fix this?
The Trudeau government could hire a new generation of fisheries scientists, as it has pledged to do.
DFO could also throw out or throw up the dog’s breakfast of unstandardized stock assessments produced by the independent duchies inside DFO. (On the Atlantic coast alone, the department operates from three separate, highly Balkanized management zones.)
Fuller’s suggested solution should be simple enough to implement: Put all 165 significant Canadian seafood stock assessments in a single document with links to all the pertinent research and fishery management plans.
You call this transparency, matey.
Enough hand-wringing, though, for there are signs of hope.
Curtailed catch efforts in U.S. and Canadian waters, for instance, have led to a remarkable recovery of Georges Bank haddock which explains why the pan-fried version is on every restaurant menu from Sydney to Baltimore.
So it can be done.
And as Oceana tells us, it’s important that we get it right to feed a hungry world.
The UN’s Food and Aquaculture Organization (FAO) would agree. In a 2014 report on wild fisheries and aquaculture, the FAO said 800 million people now suffer from chronic malnourishment.
FAO figures seafood from productive oceans is the best way to bridge the protein gap. Indeed, per capita global consumption of fish already doubled between the 1960s and 2012.
Fuller’s report is mostly silent on fish farming, but UN reports identify it as the fastest-growing seafood sector worldwide.
Nova Scotia’s fish-farming business, then, is poised for takeoff, if we pick the right locations, safeguard marine habitat and grow fish sustainably.
If we get the seafood business right, then, Nova Scotia can create jobs, make money, protect the environment, and help feed the world.
Time to get on with it.