Renewable Resources and Sustained Yield Management?

Question

How do the concepts of renewable resources and sustained yield management relate to:
i) the collapse of the ground-fish fishery in atlantic canada
ii) the problem of trying to meet the demad for salmon in British Coloumbia

Answer 1

" SUSTAINED YIELD MANAGEMENT not enforced "


In fisheries, the focus is on maximizing the production of the targeted fish using population dynamics models where escapement to ensure reproduction was the only management constraint. For the salmon fishery in Pacific North-West North America this meant that sustained yield regulation disregarded necessary escapement for nutrients for forests and for smolts returning to the ocean and the feedback effects of fishing. With hindsight it is also easily to see that catch regulation ignored fluctuating environmental conditions very pertinent to long term population levels but outside of management perimeters.

In 1992, the devestating collapse of the cod stocks off the east coast of Newfoundland forced the Canadian government to take drastic measures and close the fishery. Over 40,000 people lost there jobs. The communities are still struggling to recover. The marine ecosystem is still in a state of collapse.

The most productive cod fishing area in the vast northwest Atlantic region was located off southern Labrador and to the east of Newfoundland where the highly productive population of "northern cod" had yielded an overall annual catch of about 250,000 tons for more than a century prior to the mid-1950s .

Government and industry must share the blame for allowing the seemingly limitless stocks of cod to dwindle to near-extinction. They were too busy, following the takeover of the 200 mile zone, with making plans, setting expansive goals, and then allocating fish, and lots of it, instead of making sound, conservative business plans to match fishing effort with the limited availability of the resource. Blame also lies with the federal government for its overly optimistic reliance on science in predicting a large increase in Canada's cod catch in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of giving the severely stressed cod and other groundfish populations a respite from fishing pressure, Ottawa began freely issuing liscenses, and subsidies were provided big companies to build bigger ships and processing plants. Industry employment rose 60 percent in two decades.




"RENEWABLE RESOURCES ???? - EASIER SAID THAN DONE "

Stephen Poloz, senior vice president of Export Development Canada corporate affairs and chief economist recently stated that"B.C. fish farming today is almost as big as the regular commercial fishery."
Demand is largely driven by American consumers, who eat 80 percent of the farmed salmon from the province. Despite rising fish sales, most Canadians are protesting the use of FISH FARMS to increase the salmon population

In 2002, close to four million wild pink salmon died after contracting lethal levels of sea lice from fish farms in the Archipelago - the largest single collapse of a fishery in B.C.’s history. At the end of April 2004, juvenile pinks were seen with deadly numbers of sea lice, higher than in 2002. Many of these fish had more than 60 lice on them.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

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