Condensed from this article on the Greenpeace web site

Seafish and the fishing industry are cod-a-hoop recently, because it seems that cod stocks are doing better. You may have missed the news, but the story is that the EU’s scientific advice suggests that stocks of North Sea cod have increased 5% in the last year, and are up a whopping 40% from the average in 2005-2008.

Sounds like great news. And of course any increase in a rampantly-overfished population of animals is to be welcomed. But it needs to be set in context.

Cod stocks are generally at a historic low in the North Sea. Viewing numbers against last year, or five years ago, may indeed show a slight increase, but basic arithmetic will quickly tell you that 5 or even 40% of ‘hardly-any’ is equal to ‘not-very-much’.

And then there’s the other good news – fishermen are voluntarily taking measures to reduce ‘discards’ through measures like more selective nets and areas being closed to fishing – of course we should minimise discards, they benefit no one.

But again, let’s look at the figures in context, it’s not enough to say we have a great scheme unless it does the job and EU scientists’ news on cod discards in the North Sea for  last year is that they showed a dramatic increase in discards – more cod were caught and discarded than were caught and landed, most of which were immature.

By all means applaud those taking measures to reduce fishing capacity, minimise discards or use more selective methods, but North Sea cod are not out of the woods yet.

We should be aiming to manage our seas for the regeneration of species rather than scrabbling around amongst the low digits snapping off every green shoot of recovery as soon as it breaks the surface.

Related posts:

1. Deep water stocks at risk
2. No trawling increases quality of stocks
3. Draft UK priorities for 2009 fisheries negotiations