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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Industrialized Fisheries in Arctic & Antarctic Waters
Eastern Block nations being most active. After a very short time these nations realized that due to
the different life cycles of target species in the Southern Ocean, MSY estimates were way too high
for most species and a reduction of Total Allowable Catch (TAC) was required. With the reduction
of TACs for many species, combined with ever increasing fuel costs, a continuation of fisheries in
the Southern Ocean made no economic sense for many nations, and the fisheries off Antarctica
remained widely an unsuccessful experiment for them. Contemporary literature of the 1980s about
Antarctic resources came to the conclusion that the effort required for the results obtained from an
Antarctic fishery for any finfish species would never provide a reasonable return (Bonner, 1986).
Nevertheless, and in particular as some finfish species showed clear indications of overexploitation,
the nations interested in Antarctic fisheries began negotiations around an international convention
for regulating Antarctic fisheries. The Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living
Resources (CCAMLR) became open for signature in 1980 and entered into force in 1982. CCAMLR
was originally signed by fourteen nations, and is today ratified by 35 nations and the European
Union. In contrast to other international fisheries conventions, CCAMLR is mainly an ecosystem-
oriented scientific instrument and does not include specific operational targets for fisheries, such as
quotas, TACs, MSY-figures etc. (Fernholm & Rudbäck, 1989). Consequently CCAMLR was a
comparably weak instrument when it came to applied fisheries management, and fisheries like the
Patagonian or Antarctic Toothfish fishery, with their substantial portion of Illegal, Unreported,
Unregulated (IUU) fishery, clearly demonstrates that still today the problem of Antarctic fisheries
needs to be solved by the international community (Dodds, 2000).
Arctic – Antarctic
Any comparison between the Arctic and the Antarctic fisheries during the second half of the 20
th
century needs to come to the conclusion that fisheries in both high latitudes have changed
dramatically due to the availability of modern fisheries technology. More importantly, any
comparison will also come to the conclusion that the availability of modern fishing technology has
not solved the problems of the fisheries, but rather contributed or in the case of the Antarctic
fisheries even generated substantial issues and sometimes even severe international and/or national
conflicts among the various stakeholders. But a second look reveals substantial differences between
the high latitudes of the North and the South. While the increasing availability of technology in the
North finally resulted in a nationalization of the fracture lines between stakeholders and/or even
open conflicts, the increased level of technology available to the fisheries in the South resulted in an
increased need for international solutions, which are still not to be found today. In the North,
today‘s main conflict is between the heavy industrialized fisheries of the Arctic nations and the small
scale subsistence fisheries which according to the existing legal frameworks solutions need to be
negotiated within the individual Arctic nations, while in the South the conflict is between those
groups interested in the preservation of the unique ecosystem of Antarctica and those groups that
are mainly interested in making economic use of the 7
th
continent and the waters surrounding it,
regardless of their nationality. In the end the fracture lines and conflicts in both areas seem to follow
a very similar model. The basic question of any fisheries in the high latitudes is a simple one: are