321
Arctic Yearbook 2013
Heidbrink
disputable if ITQs equally shared among the population/fishermen of an Arctic nation are really an
option for the future of the Arctic.
Again, it is up to the Arctic nations and their citizens to make this decision themselves. But it should
be considered at least that the economic and political centers of the Arctic of today sometimes
operate in many aspects similarly to the economic and political centers of the distant-water fishing
nations of the past, at least from the perspective of people living outside these centers.
Antarctica
After the coastal nations of the North Atlantic area had extended their fishing limits up to 200 nm
there were only very few options left for the traditional distant-water fishing nations. Many of them
finally decided to leave the fisheries to the coastal nations, but not without exploring other options
in high latitudes prior to selling or scrapping their trawlers. One of the options was the Southern
Ocean or fisheries off Antarctica. While operating vessels in the remote Southern Ocean was not
really new to many of the European distant-water fishing nations, as they had participated in the
pelagic whaling activities of the 1930s (Tønnessen & Johnsen, 1982), the situation now was
completely different, as they had never carried out commercial fisheries in the area before and more
importantly their knowledge about potential target species and their physiology and biology was
limited at best. Consequently, the beginning of commercial fisheries off Antarctica was highly
experimental with only a small number of nations involved. The main target species was not even a
real fish, but Antarctic krill that was considered a nearly endless protein supply and as such the
answer to the question of global population growth and the related demand for food supplies
(Grantham & Southern Ocean Fisheries Survey, 1977).
While at least some of the fishing nations involved could solve the technological problems of
Antarctic fisheries, the krill fisheries remained to a certain degree a limited episode in global fisheries
history, as krill was not easily digestible for humans and the original estimates for Maximum
Sustainable Yield (MSY) were way too high. Anyhow, the Antarctic krill fishery had demonstrated
that fishing in high latitudes was not limited to the Arctic, but could also be done in the Southern
Ocean. But there was one major difference between the North and the South: while the fishing
grounds off the North had more or less completely become nationalized between the end of WWII
and the late 1970s, the fishing grounds in the South remained open access, and with the suspension
of all national claims in Antarctica due to the Antarctic Treaty System, there were basically no
national regulatory systems for the fisheries, but only a comparably weak international treaty system
and some national regulations for the fishing zones of sub-Antarctic islands, such as South Georgia.
There was another major difference between the Arctic and the fishing grounds off Antarctica: while
competition between domestic and distant-water fisheries had always characterized fisheries in the
North, there were no domestic fisheries off Antarctica.
Consequently the development of the fisheries off Antarctica followed completely different rules
than fisheries in the North. Operating fishing vessels in the Southern Ocean required extremely
sophisticated fishing vessels and during the first decades of these fisheries only the rich traditional
fishing nations of the northern hemisphere participated in the fishery, with the fisheries of the