Here's a message from Bunny, our campaign coordinator...
The area that we are sailing towards (the international waters of the Grand Banks and Flemish Cap) has been fished for hundreds of years, in fact it was the fish that attracted fishermen from far and wide and spurred the settlement of the Canadian Atlantic coast. Bottom trawling or dragging as its known in this part of the world, has been happening since the 1950s but really took off in the 1980s as the inshore fisheries in many countries were depleted. The fleets moved offshore and started to fish deeper and deeper. Very little is known about the deep ocean where bottom trawling is taking place or in many cases about the biology of the fish they are fishing for.
International waters (high seas) cover 64% of the earths surface, but there are more maps of the moon than there are of the deep ocean floor and few laws govern what humans can do in these areas. A recent response to Greenpeace, from the Oceanographic Institute of Spain (a governmental scientific agency responsible for collecting fisheries information) said that they had no information on the impact of their bottom trawl fleet on the seabed in the NW Atlantic despite them bottom trawling here for decades.
Based on information from 2004 survey trawls, for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, there is a high diversity of corals along the edge of the continental shelf of the Grand Banks. These corals provide habitat for marine invertebrates and for a number of commercial fish species, such as redfish and Atlantic cod. Deep sea corals are slow growing, long lived and extremely fragile making them very vulnerable to trawling impacts and they are appearing in trawling nets, particularly in the shrimp and Greenland halibut fisheries.
A moratorium would allow time for scientists to identify sensitive and fragile areas such as these coral colonies and for them to establish the necessary protection. A moratorium would also provide the motivation for policy makers to adopt longer term measures for managing and governing our global commons.
