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The end of the line.

Article Excerpt
One out of every six humans depends on fish for protein needs, yet 75 percent of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their biological limit. Factors that contribute to over-fishing are the lack of understanding of the ocean ecosystem, and a lack of a concensus on following a management plan among countries, or even among states and provinces within a country.

As with any overexploited resource, fish are fast disappearing. By 1992, the cod fishery was closed in much of Eastern Canada, leaving more than 30,000 people out of work. The federal government put up almost $4 billion to help. The idea was to diversify the economy and allow some people to stay in their communities until the stocks recover, but some think they never will.

By 2003, Canada's northern cod was so close to extinction that it was officially designated as endangered. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) noted that the northern cod population has collapsed more than 99 percent over 40 years. Canada's three other types of cod--the Laurentian, Arctic, and Maritime--were also listed as species at risk. Populations of Atlantic salmon, halibut, haddock, and walrus were also seen as seriously damaged.

Four centuries earlier, European explorers were astonished by the seemingly endless supply of cod along Canada's eastern shores. They could be caught simply by lowering buckets over the side of their ships. By the mid-1550s, more than 400 ships a season were crossing the Atlantic from Europe to take cod from the Grand Banks fishing grounds, one of the richest in the world. But, by the start of the 20th century, there were signs of trouble in the Atlantic fisheries, and elsewhere in the world.

In the United States, Atlantic halibut were so depleted that the commercial catch had to be stopped in the early 1900s, in an area that also had previously been teeming with fish.

In the 1980s, Canada's annual northern cod quotas were set at 220,000 to 230,000 tonnes. By 1992, the fishery had collapsed and the federal government closed it, thinking that it would recover within two years. It did not, but the government reopened the fishery in 1999 anyway, allowing a catch of 9,000 tonnes. In 2000, the quota...

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