Throughout much of Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and northern Norway, fishing remains the primary livelihood. Changes in fisheries affect daily life, and residents express keen interest in how their local problems and hoped-for solutions might compare with those of other communities. In line with this interest, we recently began studying adaptation and change among fishing communities of the northern Atlantic. Our North Atlantic Arc (NAARC) research project, initiated with Maine/New Hampshire Sea Grant help and now supported by the Arctic Systems Sciences program of the National Science Foundation, has two information-gathering components. The first involves building databases that will allow us to track changes in all the communities of Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. The second component involves more detailed, qualitative case studies in a few selected communities. Comparative analysis should help to draw a picture of how fishing communities have been successful in trying to cope with environmental change.

Our data collection is just under way, and for the moment we have more hypotheses than conclusions. To provide a glimpse of the emerging "big picture," we outline in this article the recent cod crises in each country and some of the human population changes occurring at the same time. Often, social changes are influenced by ecological changes, which in turn result from human activities, such as fishing. Other forces for change include the information age, globalization of the economy, and environmental variations–notably, climate.

The Atlantic Codfish Crises

For centuries, cod have been a primary resource of northern Atlantic coastal communities, and their presence is the basic reason many communities exist. During much of this time, gradual changes in the structure of fish populations, such as the removal of large older fish, were offset by gradually increased fishing effort. Thus, landings did not seem to trend up or down from one decade to the next. Following World War II, however, this apparent stability vanished. Fish populations off Norway, Iceland, and elsewhere had built up while they were left alone during the war. After the war, the abundant fish were pursued with improved technology and a new intensity. At first these efforts yielded dramatically larger catches. However, fishing fleets of the 1960s and 1970s soon began to haul in more fish than the North Atlantic could produce. Cod catches off Newfoundland more than doubled, passing 800,000 tons in 1968. A few years of such pressure drove fish populations down, and the stocks have not recovered since. In the 1980s, reported annual catches had declined to around 200,000 tons. The weakened fishery collapsed completely by 1991, when the total amount of fish present was estimated to be no more than 25,000 tons.

West Greenland’s Atlantic cod fishery suffered its own collapse in these years. Cod had rather abruptly become abundant off southwest Greenland during the late 1920s. This population came under heavy European exploitation after the war, with catches peaking above 400,000 tons in the 1960s. But a few years later the catch fell below 100,000 tons. Although a minor resurgence during the late 1980s encouraged Greenland’s Home Rule government to invest more in cod fishing, by 1993 Atlantic cod were virtually gone from west Greenland waters.

Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland also experienced fisheries crises in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Norwegian government has a standing agreement with the Federation of Norwegian Fishermen to support fishermen’s incomes. Reversing several years of reductions, the government increased these subsidies in 1989 and 1990, a move that, in effect, used North Sea oil revenues to cushion the fisheries crisis. (Subsidies after 1991 resumed their downward trend.) Strong management efforts, including a lower allowable catch and deliberate capacity reduction, sought to protect fish populations. Faroese investments in catching and processing capacity led to overfishing, with cod landings declining from about 200,000 to less than 70,000 tons between 1987 and 1993. The crisis brought bankruptcies and deepened the islands’ economic dependence on Denmark.

Iceland, unlike Newfoundland, Greenland, the Faroes, or northern Norway, has no larger realm to fall back upon if its fisheries fail. Increasingly severe quota restrictions, imposed to avert collapse, brought cod landings in the mid-1990s to around 180,000 tons per year, the lowest levels in more than 40 years. Recent surveys suggest that cod biomass has increased some since 1993. Iceland’s Marine Research Institute recommended a 1997Ð98 quota of 218,000 tons, stating that such a limit would keep the long-term probability of a collapse below one percent.

While strict quotas have been set in home waters, Iceland’s fishing industry and national economy weathered the crisis partly by expanding distant-water efforts. Some Icelandic ships fished in the "loophole" area between Norwegian and Russian management zones in the Barents Sea. Because the same cod populations swim across these political boundaries, however, this step brought conflict with Norwegian fisheries management.

Within Iceland, a system of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) has been used to distribute quota shares among fishing vessels. The social effects of ITQs are controversial. With the price for quota shares close to the market price for fish, small fishermen have ample incentive to sell or rent their shares, and would-be fishermen find that entering a fishery is prohibitively expensive. Quota shares have gradually become more concentrated among fewer ports and owners. The press calls some of these owners "sea lords," entrepreneurial aristocrats of the new fishing era. Although ITQs were once proposed as a conservation measure, meant to create property rights and hence incentives for wise use of the sea, they reportedly have increased the practice of high grading catches by discarding smaller fish. Such practices will impact fish stocks more heavily than official catch statistics might suggest.

Alternative Species

With the decline in cod, fishing communities along the Atlantic have been forced to think about economic alternatives. The first choice in many places has been to fish for alternative species. Because cod are top predators, removing them from the food chain creates new growth opportunities for other species, including whatever
they formerly ate. Declines in cod populations are sometimes followed by increases in forage fish–capelin and herring, for example–or benthic invertebrates such as crabs.

In ecological terms, shifting from cod to herring or capelin means targeting steps lower on the food chain and closer to primary production (phytoplankton). When the alternative species have a lower market value, fishermen must harvest more biomass to maintain their level of income. This has unknown, but potentially large, impacts on the rest of the marine ecosystem. Removing forage fish, for example, might make it harder for predators such as cod to recover. A scarcity of larger predatory fish and a new abundance of other species are clear signs of an ecosystem shifting towards a lower trophic level. Declines in average trophic levels have been observed on fishing grounds worldwide.

In the northwest Atlantic, fishing down food webs has been most evident in the shift to invertebrates. Maine’s well-known transition from groundfish to shellfish occurred gradually, but recent shifts of this type have been more sudden. Greenland’s shrimp landings expanded during the 1980s and 1990s, offering an alternative to the vanishing cod. Shrimp now account for three-quarters of Greenland’s total exports, which leaves Greenland uncomfortably dependent upon a single species that is known to display large variations in abundance.

After the groundfish collapse in Newfoundland, crab catches there rose. The shellfishing industry in that province now provides a net income comparable to the former groundfish industry, albeit to far fewer people. The increasing value of Atlantic shellfish, including previously unpopular types such as urchin and crab, reflects Asian and especially Japanese demand. Our new global economy, flying on inexpensive jet fuel, has visibly transformed seafood marketing, processing, and harvesting, and in the process has changed the marine ecosystems that support fishing communities throughout this region.

Trends in Human Populations

While fish populations fluctuated widely in recent years, the human populations of fishing communities changed less dramatically, but often in a negative direction. The population of Norway, for example, grew 9.5 percent from 1970 to 1990, while the population of its most fishing-dependent municipalities fell 11 percent. Propelled by a high birth rate, Newfoundland’s population climbed steeply between the province’s confederation with Canada (1949) and the mid-1980s. After that, the birth rate fell and out- migration increased, ending overall growth. The population of the Avalon Peninsula area around Newfoundland’s capital, St. John’s, continued to grow through immigration until the codfish collapse in 1992. Other Newfoundland regions, however, had been losing population for a decade or more, particularly in areas dependent on fishing.

In Greenland, a high birth rate and falling death rate spurred rapid postwar population growth. As cod declined, however, former codfishing communities such as Paamiut lost residents, while the new shrimping center, Sisimiut, grew. The Faroe Islands’ net migration turned negative after the islands’ fisheries declined, causing total population to fall 9 percent between 1989 and 1995. Even in some Icelandic communities, where fish stocks now seem healthy and the human population is growing, residents express nervousness about the future. Their concern is evident in their preference for renting rather than buying their homes.

When prey becomes scarcer, the ranks of predators must eventually thin out too. This ecological principle seems to fit fishing communities: People move away as fish-based livelihoods decline or become unreliable. Human ecology is more complex than a simple predator-prey system, of course, and there are other large forces at work here. On one hand, some governments choose to subsidize their fishing sectors, partly with the goal of maintaining communities’ viability. Although subsidies usually benefit certain individuals and communities more than others, they can partly insulate fishermen from fluctuations in fish populations. Large government investments or new resource development can build up the non-fishing economy of favored communities. On the other hand, emigration from small fishing communities follows a general rural-to-urban pattern also seen in many farming, forestry, or mining regions. This pattern reflects an even more general trend in modern society, away from the labor-intensive modes of production that often characterize rural life and towards the opportunities and amenities of urban areas. Young people from north Norway, for example, might prefer moving south to Oslo to work on the new airport rather than staying north to fish in Lofoten–even if the fishing pays better.

Migration can change populations in qualitative as well as quantitative ways. Among the people who leave fishing communities, disproportionate numbers are young adults, women, and people with transferable skills. Because female out-migration threatens community viability, experimental programs in Norway have sought to create job opportunities especially for young women in small coastal communities.

Adaptation and Change

While governments around the Atlantic try out new management strategies to avoid repeating old mistakes, many fishermen and communities make their own adjustments to market, ecosystem,and regulatory change. One obvious adjustment has been to target alternative species, but that step sometimes brings other problems and offers no more than a temporary solution. A more basic change has been to seek economic diversification, so that communities once reliant mainly on fishing have other livelihoods, and fewer people need to make their living from limited marine resources.

A community’s prospects for economic development depend on its particular combination of natural resources, human resources, market conditions, and government investment decisions. Often, official committees consider possible ways to broaden the local economy. Those lists of suggestions vary, but frequently include aquaculture and tourism. New industries will, of course, bring further social and ecological change. Tourists, for example, tend to be seasonal creatures and not necessarily more reliable (or unlimited) than fish. One goal of our comparative study will be to learn more about the conditions under which economic diversification efforts have the best record of success.

Adaptation occurs at the individual and family levels as well. Insecurity about the future has been a common theme in the interviews we conducted in a formerly booming Newfoundland outport. Some young people, both single and married, have moved away to Yellowknife to mine or to Alberta to work in oil fields. Fishermen in their forties and fifties say that they are poised to move to their grown children’s new communities if they fail to get a crucial new fishing permit or to assemble enough licenses and odd jobs to make it through the next year. Young people who only 10 years ago would have dropped out of high school to join fathers on their boats or mothers in the plants now say they will finish high school and go on to trade school.

Families adapt by being fluid in terms of who moves and who works: One family member’s success in landing a job, a fishing permit, or even a pension affects the plans of the whole group. Families and small business owners both try to "get by with less" in difficult times, applying their own labor to substitute for more costly goods or services from others. Often, the individual adaptation strategies are part of family strategies, which in turn depend on community developments.