Gallery: What Happens to the Fish When?

... until you realise that these images are now completely unfamiliar to a whole generation of Newfoundlanders. Then it hits you: the time when Newfoundland and cod were synonymous is like ancient history today; seeing fish coming up in a cod trap or a hearing a make-and-break engine heading out into the dawn is like imagining the last days of Pompei. Fish were us, and we them, for five centuries. Without them, a hole has opened in our culture, dirged by every foghorn that Ottawa has not yet decommissioned. How many today know how to haul a trap, cut out tongues, scull a punt? Does it matter?

They moved on to fish out the less developed, less protected - in this case, Morocco. The triumph of this film is not only the remarkable trust and intimacy which the filmmaker establishes with his subjects, but the room he provides for the viewer to walk into the program, and to ponder it. We enter a coastal world where marooned fishermen can't afford fish to eat, while they watch foreign industrial trawlers on the horizon nightly vacuuming up 4000 tonnes of the very fish they are forbidden to catch. The juxtaposition of subsistence fishers' poverty with high-tech industrial dragging is stark. The sheer amount of fish coming over the trawler's side seems shocking by comparison, as does the trawler captain's scorn for marine environmental protection in his home country. This is a beautifully paced film with great heart, but also with disturbing questions. As the trawler captain asserts: if the fish is there, why not take the quota in the most efficient manner?

The strong juxtapositions in this feature will evoke a deja vu for Newfoundland viewers. How can it be that local fishers are kept under moratorium, while foreign draggers are not? Morocco has a 200 mile limit, and a history of recent clashes with EU quotas. Why has the government sold quotas to a multinational company while forcibly idling local inshore fishers? What effect is the bottom trawling having on Moroccan marine habitat? And why is this still happening two decades after the Northern Cod catastrophe red-flagged these issues?

Farley Mowat certainly did in 1989, with this film based on his book of the same name. His outraged cry about the history of over-exploitation of the Western Atlantic is enough to make you an overnight vegetarian. Strong arguments, with lots of blood on the ice and water, this is Mowat's curse upon the excesses which humanity has visited upon marine life. Unfortunately, his film didn't sway Ottawa's fishery policy and 3 years after it was made, Newfoundland's cod stocks disappeared. The film is passionate, and certainly capitalises on emotionally loaded money shots, but 40 years later does it seem a little pornographic, a j'accuse with a whiff of marine-resource-snuff-film? And so what - why shouldn't filmmakers try to shock and awe their viewers? How else to change things? But does it leave still us the question: what shall we eat for dinner (besides carrots)?

Cod built a four-century-long friendship between Portugal and Newfoundland. This began to change after Newfoundland's confederation with Canada, and when Portugal later joined the European Union, routing official relations via Ottawa and Brussels. Overfishing by EU draggers soured relations, and by the late 1980s Portuguese vessels were banned from Canadian ports, thus ending the long Portugal-Newfoundland relationship.

Prior to Newfoundland's 1949 confederation with Canada, cod landings had been sustainable at around 250,000 tonnes. At the time this film was made in 1966, Ottawa had granted Newfoundland only a 12 mile offshore fishing limit. A heavy foreign fishery depleted the resource, and the cod biomass continued to decline until 1977. At that point, Ottawa extended the limit to 200 miles, and the domestic offshore sector prepared for a bonanza. Canadian draggers entered the fray in a big way, many ice-reinforced to permit fishing in ice-infested northern waters for spawning cod. Landings increased through 1985 but inshore catch declined as offshore landings rose. (Harris Centre report, 2007)

It may be tempting to watch this film and romanticise about the days when cod were plentiful and everything was golden off our coasts. In fact, handlining from banker sailing vessels like this was "industrial" fishing in the old way, and over centuries certainly took lots of cod out of the water. From an ecological perspective, was it preferable modern high-tech fish hunting, or was it just less efficient?

... and their protest against the social, economic and environmental impacts. The target of their protest is the iindustry giant Cooke Aquaculture, whose video we're also featuring here.