Bottom Trawling

The eco-system of the seafloor is remote, overtly sensitive and extremely vulnerable. When the United Nations took on the issue of bottom trawling, CWF hoped its decision would support long-term sustainable fishing rather than socio-economics. We want those sea-floor habitats to have a healthy future, after all.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way things worked out. In late 2006, the UN General Assembly decided against banning bottom trawling in the high seas. We were also extremely disheartened by our own government’s lack of support for the proposed moratorium.

Canada guilty of trawling

Bottom trawling is a method of fishing that involves dragging giant nets with metal doors along the ocean floor. The ecological impacts of such a practice are staggering. For example, trawling often bulldozes deep-sea coral communities that are nursery areas and sources of food and shelter for other species. But this kind of fishing is something that Canada is reluctant to condemn internationally, because we practise bottom trawling within our own waters.

We believe this is why Canada refused to back the ban during negotiations late last year. It argued instead for stronger regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), which are multinational organizations that manage either a particular species or all the resources within a specific marine region.

CWF wrote a letter to Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to question the logic behind this argument, considering that RFMOs have so far not succeeded in preventing degradation of marine environments where fishing occurs. We also reminded the minister of the devastation trawl nets leave in their wake. Nothing escapes these nets, and their indiscriminate damage is well documented.

Canada must take a leadership role in sustainable fishing and set an international example by using species-selective commercial fish harvesting methods. But making an international difference will only be possible if we first clean up our act at home.

There has been some progress as Canada has acted to protect vulnerable coral reef ecosystems from bottom trawling off Nova Scotia. The Northeast Channel was protected by a fisheries closure in 2002, and the Gully area was protected by its designation as a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in 2004.

World slow to take action

Internationally, Costa Rica was the first country to ask the U.N. to take action on high seas bottom trawling. 1/3 of New Zealand’s waters are now protected from bottom trawling, yet critics point out that most of the protected areas were not viable for trawling in the first place  

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