A Cod Forsaken Place?: Fishing in an Altered State in Newfoundland

Abstract

The collapse of cod stocks in the waters off Newfoundland in the early 1990s was widely understood as an ecological disaster and the death of a rural way of life that had endured for centuries. While many areas have remained closed to commercial cod fishing for two full decades, growing numbers of commercial fishers and some fisheries scientists now agree that stocks in several areas are finally showing signs of rebuilding. While the biological recovery of cod populations was once widely viewed as being essential to the future well-being of coastal communities, many commercial fishers now publicly express concerns about the possibility of this scenario actually coming to pass. This article explores the roots of these changing constructions of cod. I argue that making sense of the anxieties and uncertainties that presently surround the question of cod recovery requires paying close attention to the ways in which access to fishery resources has been transformed over time, as well as to the ways in which changing production chains for seafood products, shifting scientific paradigms and practices, and unexpected changes in the marine environment have converged in ways that are fundamentally challenging many previously held notions of the ecological good.

Neoliberalism and the politics of enclosure in North American small-scale fisheries

“…Faced with diminishing resources, government fisheries and ocean management agencies have been increasingly forced to rely on a diverse array of public-private partnerships with universities, nongovernment organizations, and private corporations in order to carry out their mandates. This fits seamlessly into the neoliberal view that the state should assume more of an overseeing role and share more responsibilities with the private sector [115][116][117][118].…”

Interactive Governance for Small-Scale Fisheries

“…The collapse of the cod population and the ensuing moratorium in the early 1990s was widely cited as a landmark event that signaled the downturn of the inshore fi shery in Newfoundland and Labrador (Palmer and Sinclair 1997 ;Harris 1998 ;Davis 2014 ). The closure of the cod fi shery resulted in a large reduction in the number of inshore ground fi sh licenses, particularly for those operating small boats less than A. M. Song (*) • R. Chuenpagdee Department of Geography , Memorial University , St. John's , Canada e-mail: amsong@mun.ca; ratanac@mun.ca 35 ft in length.…”

Introduction to the themed issue - Poststructural approaches to fisheries

“…In this way, Johnsen's work contributes a fisheries case to what is a much larger body of critical work on state policy on natural resources (cf. Robbins, 2007;Davis, 2014;Davis and Zanotti, 2014;Song 2015).…”