This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 22:41 and is filed under Fisheries Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Earlier this autumn a fisheries conference was held at the Sjöhistoriska Maritime Museum in Stockholm in connection with my photo exhibition “Ocean Fishing — Six Trips on the North Atlantic”. The central theme of the conference dealt with how to develop sustainable fisheries management in the Nordic countries and among the invited speakers were Ásmundur Guðjónsson, representative from the Nordic Council in Copenhagen, stated in his presentation that there is no common management policy in the Nordic countries — but 8 different ones.
Some of the other invited speakers was Hjalti í Jákupstovu from the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory, Jan Pieter Groenhof, senior adviser for Norway’s Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs, and Mogens Schou, head of the development for fishereries and aquaculture at the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in Denmark. Issues of discussion that came up later in the afternoon included Icelandic adviser Pétur Bjarnason’s critique of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and their references to alleged overfishing, which according to Bjarnason, are grossly exaggerated in their statistics. Røgnvaldur Hannesson, professor of fishery economics, Bergen, Norway, pointed to natural fluctuations in the past which show that overfishing was a relatively small problem in the long run.
