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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Industrialized Fisheries in Arctic & Antarctic Waters
between the various stakeholders and actors became more visible and more obvious, and the
domestic struggles became at least somewhat analogous to the former international struggles.
A particularly interesting example in this context seems to be the struggle for modernization of the
Newfoundland fisheries during the late 1970s and 1980s. While up to this point Canadian fishing
industries had hesitated to introduce highly sophisticated factory freezer trawlers following a
tradition reaching back to the first decades of the 20
th
century (Balcom, 1996), the Canadian
government now tried to foster such a development by chartering West German factory freezer
trawlers for trial fisheries in the late 1980s (Canada. Dept. of et al., 1985). However when a
Newfoundland fishing company tried to establish a joint venture with a West German fishing
company and gained support for the project by the Newfoundland provincial government, the
federal government of Canada intervened and ended the joint venture before it became a reality
(Heidbrink, 2004).
Nevertheless, many Arctic nations modernized their fishing fleets successfully and built up
impressive technologically sophisticated industrial fishing fleets.
The ever increasing demand for fish in Europe and North America caused the now large and
industrialized fishing companies of the Arctic and sub-Arctic nations to explore the fishing grounds
further north and thus to get in direct competition with local small scale fisheries. Again, there were
on the one side highly sophisticated fishing trawlers of large fishing companies like Royal Greenland
or the Icelandic Samherji Group; while on the other side their were locally operated small scale
fisheries with their comparably small and less sophisticated fishing vessels. Up to a certain degree it
might be stated that history repeats itself at least when it comes to the competition between
industrialized and traditional fisheries, even if the theatre of the conflict moved further north and
the political conflict was fought within national parliaments and governed by domestic instead of
international law.
The Markets
Thus it might be interesting to look at the markets for the products of these fisheries and how they
have changed during recent decades. When it comes to the market for the industrialized fisheries
there can be no doubt that the main markets for these fisheries are the frozen-fish markets of
Europe and North America, or in a very simplified approach the raw material markets for the frozen
fish processing industries of these regions (Heidbrink, 2008a). With fish no longer an easily
perishable good, but a frozen staple and industrial raw material, the market has become global with
only large scale players surviving in the field. Thus only the highly modernized fisheries might be
able to survive in a market that is characterized by global competition, with even Southeast Asian
players being routinely involved. While it has become clear that companies like Royal Greenland, the
Samherji Group, or other actors of the same size might be able to act successfully in this market, it
has also become obvious that local fisheries of the Arctic regions cannot survive in this market. But
while this segment of the market is without doubt the most relevant when it comes to the volume of
the trade, it needs to be noted that this is not the only segment of the European and/or North
American main markets; there is also a high-price segment of the market that is not looking for the