Cod’s end

The New England Fisheries Management Council meets Monday in Peabody, Mass., to examine the latest scientific assessment of cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine. Sifting through the ashes might be a better description.

The mighty Atlantic cod has fallen. The fish that changed the world, or that at least gave Europeans of centuries ago reason to move to the New World, is itself practically history. The man-made disaster waiting to happen, has.

Why? Mismanangement, political pressure, arrogance and greed are the usual suspects, but the unpredictability of a species as perplexing as it once was common, environmental question marks and good old economic necessity — the human survival instinct — cannot be discounted.

What to do? To a considerable degree, the council’s work of designing a plan that will allow the depleted spawning stock to rebuild already has been done, thanks to a new rule that cuts the daily boat limit from 700 pounds of cod to 400, a haul hardly worth the trouble. All that remains for the council to do is to lower 400 to zero, to totally eliminate bycatch (the harvest of species other than the intended target), to close the entire Eastern Seaboard (not just Georges Bank, not just the Gulf of Maine) to cod fishing and to hope for the best.

None of which will be easy. At the core of this debacle is the Magnuson Act of 1976, in which Congress wisely extended U.S. territorial waters to 200 miles to keep out foreign factory ships and then unwisely established a low-interest loan program for new American fishing vessels. This proved very attractive to syndicates of nonfishermen, especially Massachusetts doctors and lawyers, and so commercial fishing for the first time had major players who did not care about the generations to come. The arms race was on.

Now, after suffering through more than two decades of patchwork regulation by the council and the National Marine Fisheries Service to undo the damage, fishermen are understandably skeptical. They have little faith in the science behind the regs — remember, it was just two years ago that the same scientists now predicting catastrophe were saying the 1994 closure of Georges Bank was bearing fruit. Fishermen warned that the Georges Bank closure would drive a fleet too big, too powerful and too efficient into the Gulf of Maine. They warned that to merely ratchet down the allowable catch would force fishermen to keep only the highest-quality fish and to waste the rest overboard. They warned that pigeonholing fishermen into specific fisheries was contrary to the time-proven practice of fishing for what is plentiful. They warned that boat buy-out programs unfairly favored the syndicates and that retraining opportunities were impossible for all but the youngest fishermen. Those warnings were pooh-poohed by the regulators, so of course they came true.

The regulators admit some culpability, but also are quick to call fishermen just plain greedy. Greed surely is a common vice among those trying to pay bills and feed a family.

All this pathetic tale lacks is some irony, so here it is: Peabody is just a few miles down the road from Gloucester, home port to the last great New England cod fleet. Gloucester’s Ipswich Bay just happens to be home to what may be the last great school of New England cod. Thus, a treasure that a suffering community desperately needs is at its feet, yet out of reach. Indeed, cod work in mysterious ways.

New England is not the first part of the world to suffer a cod collapse; so has Norway, so has Atlantic Canada. Those two countries responded with strong medicine — widespread, comprehensive closures to preserve the fish — but also with compassion — fully funded life-support systems to preserve the fishermen. As this country moves to save its cod stocks, perhaps this time it will include the human element as well.