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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Industrialized Fisheries in Arctic & Antarctic Waters
imports, there was also the problem of what to do with the factory freezer trawler fishing fleets that
have been built up only a couple of years earlier. The obvious thing to do for the fishing companies
owning and operating these trawlers was to look for new fishing grounds for these ships. These
fishing grounds were finally found in the Arctic and a couple of years later also in the waters off
Antarctica. Of course there were enormous technological challenges to operate the ships in the
often ice-covered waters of the high latitudes, but due to a number of technological innovations
these problems could be largely solved (Meeresforschung, 1994). European trawlers and in particular
West German trawlers began to operate off Greenland, Newfoundland and up the Labrador
coastline, and many other areas of the Arctic. Thanks to the deep-freezing technology onboard the
vessels, the long distance between the new operational areas and the European landing ports did not
matter (Heidbrink, 2011).
But of course as the Cod Wars did not only result in an extension of the Iceland fishing zone up to
200 nm, but the introduction of 200 nm Exclusive Economic Zones all along the Arctic coastlines
and ultimately the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS III), the
operations of factory freezer trawlers needed to be done on the basis of quota negotiations between
the respective coastal nation and the distant-water fishing nation. At any rate, as the regulations of
UNCLOS III required that fishing quotas should be made available to foreign fishing fleets if the
domestic fisheries could not utilize the whole amount of the maximum sustainable yield for the
respective areas, distant-water fishing nations could continue operations on Arctic (and Antarctic)
fishing grounds (Stokke, 2001).
Thus the situation for most parts of the Arctic were during the 1980s as the following: domestic
fisheries of the coastal nations operated on the inshore grounds with fishing boats and equipment of
a low technological level, while the offshore grounds were worked by factory freezer trawlers of
distant-water fishing nations on the basis of quotas made available to these nations.
After the Re-Organization / Extension of Fisheries Limits
This situation could not last long for a variety of reasons. First and foremost was the simple fact that
the domestic fisheries of Arctic nations should not only contribute to domestic consumption, but
for the development of export markets. As these fisheries were charged with the task of generating
revenue for sustaining the newly reached sovereignty and supporting the related societal changes,
they needed to be transformed from a domestic industry into an export-oriented industry (Canada.
Dept. of, Oceans, & Crosbie, 1985). Second and of nearly equal relevance, the distant-water fishing
fleets of the European nations lost a good deal of their former economic importance as the
European fish processing industry began to import the majority of their raw material supply, and at
the same time operations in the remaining areas open to European distant-water fisheries became
somewhat uneconomic due to heavily increased fuel costs. The time was ripe for a change.
Ending the differences in the level of technological advancements between the domestic fishing
fleets of the Arctic and sub-Arctic nations on the one hand, and the distant-water-fishing nations on
the other, largely achieved this change. Nations like Iceland and Norway invested in a modernization
of their fishing fleets, which soon became as equally sophisticated as their distant-water fishing