315
Arctic Yearbook 2013
Heidbrink
Union ordered their first factory freezer trawlers with stern ramps at a German shipyard, and other
nations, for example East and West Germany, also built their first series of factory freezer trawlers
(Heidbrink, 2011). Interestingly enough Canadian fisheries experimented with factory freezer
trawlers, but due to a number of organizational difficulties never introduced them in large scale to
the fleets of their Atlantic fishing ports (Canada. Dept. of, Oceans, Steering Group for Monitoring
Socio-Economic Impacts of the Factory Freezer Trawler, Gardner Pinfold Consulting, & Griffiths-
Muecke, 1987). Nevertheless it can be stated that the introduction of the factory freezer trawler was
one of the most important changes that ever happened in the context of the North Atlantic and the
related Arctic fishing industries. But despite the importance of this change it needs to be mentioned
that only a limited number of nations participated in this change, most notably the UK, the Soviet
Union and its satellite nations, as well as smaller Western European fishing nations, with West
Germany by no means the most relevant nation in this context, but up to a certain degree at least the
technological leader (Heidbrink, 2011).
Arctic nations also modernized their fishing fleets after WWII, but did not introduce factory freezer
trawlers due to a variety of factors, most notably the comparably small size of their operations. The
most important fishing vessels of the Arctic nations became relatively small fishing boats that were
equipped with diesel engines but still largely limited to operations in coastal waters (Sverrisson,
2002).
An ever increasing demand for fish in the main European and American markets, combined with
the building-up of large scale fishing fleets by some of the European distant water fishing nations
and the newly achieved complete or partial sovereignty of Arctic nations, led more or less
automatically to severe international conflicts on access to fishing grounds off Arctic and sub-Arctic
regions, in particular the fishing conflicts between Iceland and the UK and West Germany. The
story of this conflict is well known and a number of recent historical studies suggested that besides
the political dimension and the economic de-colonization of the North Atlantic region another
major reason for the conflict had been the different levels of fisheries technology available to the
fishing companies of the nations involved in the conflict (Heidbrink, 2004; Jón Þ, 1995). On the one
side of the conflict were the industrialized European distant water fishing nations using highly
sophisticated factory freezer trawlers with electronic fish detection equipment, while on the other
side the Icelandic fisheries were widely depending on less sophisticated technology and comparable
small and often open vessels for coastal operations (Guðni Th, North Atlantic Fisheries History, &
Fiske Icelandic, 2007).
During the course of the conflict that was often referred to as a ‗Cod War‘, it became obvious for
the European distant water fishing nations that access to the fishing grounds off Iceland would
come sooner or later to an end (Gilchrist, 1978). At the end of the conflict in 1976 the UK needed
to accept the Icelandic claim for a 200 nm fishing zone and thus the mid-Atlantic fishing grounds
off Iceland were no longer available for European distant-water fishing fleets (Hannes, 1982).
While the Cod Wars marked an important step towards a complete economic sovereignty of Iceland,
it left the distant-water fishing nations not only with a lost minor international conflict, but also with
a severe problem. While the fish supply for the European markets could be widely secured by