Sustainable British cod on the menu after stocks recover

Excerpt. “Stocks of cod in the North Sea were once one of the world’s great fisheries but plummeted by 84% between the early 1970s and 2006. They came perilously close to the total collapse seen in the Grand Banks fishery off Canada in the early 1990s, which has still not recovered.

But action to decommission fishing boats, ban catches in nursery areas and put larger holes in nets to allow young cod to escape has seen the stock rise fourfold since 2006. The MSC, a non-profit certification group, undertook a detailed 18-month study and has now approved the North Sea cod catch of 228 boats in Scotland and England, which represents the vast majority of the white fish fleet.

Sustainable North Sea cod will carry the MSC’s blue label and is expected in supermarkets as early as next week, with Waitrose likely to be among the first to offer the fish. North Sea cod has never been approved by the MSC in the group’s 20-year history and the MSC certification also requires fishers to protect cold water corals from damage by trawlers.”

read the GUARDIAN article here

Comment by Mark Kurlansky: “Enjoy cod’s revival, but the extent of our ruination of the sea remains unknown”

Excerpt. “If this is all true, I am very happy for the fishermen. They have earned it. However, I have been following fisheries for many years and so often such good news is the prelude to disaster. What’s more, with ocean ecology being continually altered by climate change, anyone who thinks of overfishing as the central problem in fish survival is not living in the 21st century. “

read the complete comment here