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DFO Destroying East Coast Fishing Industry |
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Written by NS Liberals
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Friday, 09 February 2007 |
Several fishing groups are lobbying to prevent a Scottish company, Lunar Fishing Inc., from trawling for herring off Cape Breton, arguing it will endanger fish stocks. The Scottish parent company came to Lunenburg in the fall of 2005 hoping to find mackerel, but that hasn’t happened and the company was allowed to catch herring in the meantime.
Angry fisherman say they will confront the department over the prospect it may grant Lunar Fishing Inc. license to trawl for herring. Josephine Burke-Kennedy, a fisherman who represents multi-species license-holders in Cape Breton said she knows first hand the devastation the trawling has wrought on communities. “There were four service stations, a credit union and a local grocery store,” said Burke-Kennedy. “They’re all gone now. You can lie down in the middle of the road at dinnertime and have no fear of getting run over.” There nothing left for the local fishermen and as a result people move elsewhere to find work.
Theriault is frustrated over the state of the fisheries and the impact it is having and will continue to have on rural economies. “What good will this do Nova Scotia or our coastal communities if we give this mid-water trawling company half of our herring stock. We can’t give any more of our fishery away to huge corporations, especially to foreign interests. We have herring fishermen around our coastal waters of Nova Scotia that are on the verge of starving to death.”
Theriault and others in the industry are left to wonder what are the goals of DFO. “What do they want for the future of this industry? Will there even be a need for fishermen in the future?” said Theriault. “There’s a mistrust of fisheries managers and how they are dealing with the industry as a whole.”
Trawling is especially hard on stocks and can be devastating to the community. Mid-water trawling was reintroduced to the U.S. eastern seaboard and impacted the migratory patterns of tuna and swordfish because their food source was now gone.
Theriault and Burke Kennedy have made the same analogy. ”With mid-water trawling it’s so efficient it’s like shooting fish in a barrel with a machine gun. There is nowhere to hide and they’ll adjust it to get every last remaining fish.” |
