In St. John's this week at the AGM mtg of the Canadian Fisheries Research Network, I have heard disturbing rumours that Ocean Choice International has made a special arrangement with the Spanish to harvest OCI flatfish quotas on the Grand Banks. This rumour is circulating in the context of OCI's decision to close fish processing plants at Marystown and Port Union. If true, this will be the death knell for a large portion of the fishery in NL. It will also violate every tenet of Canadian fisheries policy and the province's fish processing policies. Who is allowing a Canadian company to take a  resource that belongs to the people of Canada and turn it over to Spanish pirates who have raped and pillaged the straddling fish stocks for decades? This is an abuse of everything Canadians fought for when we extended fisheries jurisdiction. Who will stand up and put an end to this outrage????

TAGS: sustainable, fisheries, Newfoundland, Ocean Choice International, Spain, sellout, fisheries treachery, Mayrstown, NAFO,

Following the recent ICCAT meeting Canada's porbeagle fishers get to continue hunting porbeagles despite their endangered status. Porbeagle sharks are considered by the IUCN as critically endangered in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean, and endangered in the Northwest Atlantic. The joint ICCAT-ICES assessment of porbeagle sharks in 2009 shows that a rebuilding of the population to MSY would take decades, even if all fisheries and bycatch of porbeagle are banned and fishing mortality is reduced to zero. At a meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) in Istanbul, Turkey earlier this month, Canada was the only nation among 48 to defend porbeagle fishing and oppose a ban. Ironically the EU, long a pariah in the Northwest Atlantic for its overfishing of groundfish stocks in the NAFO area, won praise from environmental groups for taking a tough conservation stance on sharks, including porbeagles.