Författare: Gemma Ware Host The Conversation Weekly Podcast The Conversa

For generations, cod fishing was a way of life in Newfoundland and Labrador, the easternmost province in Canada. But in 1992, after cod stocks in the north Atlantic plummeted, the federal government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing. It was to last for 32 years until it was lifted in June 2024.

The decision was controversial and in this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast we speak to a fisheries expert to shed light on what’s happened. It offers a cautionary tale for those politicians trying to balance the complex demands of protecting ecosystems that also support substantial economies.

Newfoundland is a sleepy place with colourful wooden houses and icebergs that pass by its northern shores in early summer. The island is perched out in the north Atlantic near the grand banks, some of the most prolific fishing waters in the world.

Fishing has been the backbone of the economy for centuries, and so when the Canadian government imposed a cod moratorium in 1992 it had a huge impact, with an estimated 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador out of work overnight. Some cod fishing was permitted in inshore waters from the late 1990s in boats less than 20 metres long, but all commercial offshore trawler fishing was prohibited.

A number of factors led to the decline of the cod population, but the most significant was overfishing, explains Tyler Eddy, a research scientist in fisheries science at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

When they started to put the brakes on the fishing it was already too late, the population had been already reduced to a low level.

The expectation was that the moratorium would last for a few years, enough for the cod stocks to recover. But that didn’t happen, explained Eddy.

That was one of the big surprises of the moratorium was that we stopped fishing and fish didn’t come back.

Inshore fishermen had continued to cod throughout much of the moratoirum period, and they’re angry at the decision to reopen fishing to offshore trawlers.
Ramon Cliff/Shutterstock

Moving goalposts

There was a little uptick in 2016, but the recovery stalled. Then, in 2023, a new historical dataset tracking how many baby cod made it to adulthood back in the boom years of the 1960s was introduced into the annual assessment of the cod stocks.

The effect, explains Eddy, who was one of the scientists involved in the decision, was to reduce what experts believed the cod population could recover to. It also lowered the reference points for whether a stock is in the critical, cautious or healthy zone.

It would be as if a car was doing 80km/hour and the speed limit used to be 60km/hour, so it was over the speed limit. Now the speed limit is changing to 80km so the car is actually doing within the speed limit. The car hasn’t changed speed at all, it’s just the reference point has changed.

And this is what happened: the 2024 assessment of cod stocks using this new dataset put cod in the cautious zone, rather than the critical zone.

In June, the Canadian government used this shift to justify lifting the moratorium. It increased the total allowable catch for the year from 13,000 to 18,000 tonnes and reopened some cod fishing in offshore waters in 2024, including to some international trawlers.

It’s since emerged that this decision went against the scientific advice of officials within Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the department which manages fishing. They had recommended maintaining the existing level of total allowable catch and continuing to limit it to inshore fishers.

A spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada told The Conversation that it makes fishery decisions informed by the best available science and a range of other factors, including socioeconomic considerations.

Newfoundland is now waiting until early 2025 when the next stock assessment of the Atlantic cod takes place, to see what the impact will be. Eddy explained how finely balanced the situation is:

Even though we are in the cautious zone, we’re just barely in the cautious zone … we’ve just barely crossed this threshold, and there’s actually a probability that we could still be within the critical zone. And if we look at the projections for the next three years, I think there’s a two-thirds to three-quarter chance that we’re going to end up back in the critical zone.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction from Harris Kuemmerle, environment and energy editor at The Conversation Canada.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from CBC News NL – Newfoundland and Labrador, CTV Your Morning and CBC News.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

What happens when a gangster leaves their life on the street? How do they transition to something new? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out through the life stories of two people who joined gangs as young men and came out the other side.

Dennis Rodgers, a research professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, has spent decades studying youth gangs across Latin America, particularly Nicaragua. In 2019, Rodgers launched a global research project called GANGS to explore the commonalities across gangs, gangsters and ganglands around the world.

Rodgers says there are a huge variety of factors why somebody might leave a gang. This could range from having children or getting married, to experiencing violent trauma or being imprisoned. Other reasons he knows of have included:

Becoming bored, having a lucky escape, being conscripted into the army, emigrating, a death in the family, or moving away from the neighborhood … having a friend being killed in front of them, or parental pressure, or evangelical religious conversion, being betrayed, or finding employment.

The common thread here, he explains, is that “a lot of being able to leave the gang is being occupied by something else”.

Part of the GANGS project involved working with researchers to publish the life stories of 31 gang members across 23 countries.

Gaz, the head of a gang in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, was one of them.
He’d spent time with a researcher called Kieran Mitton at King’s College London, who followed Gaz’s transition from the head of a street gang or clique called the Giverdam Squad, to poet and now a cooperative farmer with his former gang members. Gaz told The Conversation:

That’s the mission, to help take people off the streets, bring them to see the reality of life. Now I can boast of up to 32 cooperative members, all former gang members.

Drugs to tortillas

Another of the life histories collected for the project is that of Milton, somebody Rodgers first met on the streets of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Milton was nine when he and a friend first joined a gang, because, he told Rodgers, “we were bored”. This was at the tail end of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The education system was crumbling and the economic situation was dire.

Eventually the gang got involved in drugs, and become more violent, at which point Milton quit and went to live in Costa Rica. When he came back, he decided to set up a drug-delivery service, working to deliver drugs by bicycle to clients who’d text him their orders. When that went sour after a government crackdown, Milton turned to making tortillas, upending the usual production methods in the city to deliver fresh tortillas on demand in the same way as he’d used to deliver drugs. Rodgers explains:

The normal model is for one individual to make 150 to 200 tortillas a day. He’s making 3,000 tortillas a day … And you can see the way in which this has actually really profited him. His house is one of the few houses in the neighbourhood to have a second story, which is something that only drug dealers had.

Rodgers says the lives of people like Milton and Gaz shows that being a gang member doesn’t “condemn you to a particular kind of trajectory”. What happens to people after they’ve left the gang, and their successes and failures, are often not directly linked to the violence and criminality that dominated their lives inside the gang.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear an interview with Gaz, and Dennis Rodgers. You can read more life stories from the GANGS project on The Conversation.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…