Canada cancels fish session with Greenland

Canada has cancelled its annual meeting with Greenland to discuss fish quotas because of an incident last December in which the Canadian Coast Guard nabbed a Greenlandic trawler scooping up shrimp in an off-limits area near Newfoundland.

The meeting was scheduled for mid-January in Nuuk, but at the last minute, Ottawa decided to cancel and sent a letter to Greenland, requesting more information.

“Essentially, it was not a legal activity. There had been a NAFO quota for Greenland, Denmark and the Faroe Islands of 144 tonnes of shrimp,” said Steve Outhouse, a spokesperson for the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans in Ottawa. “These countries had set a unilateral quota that was higher than that.”

By cancelling the meeting, Outhouse said Canada could “voice our displeasure with their unilateral quota and being in an area they shouldn’t be in.”

“It’s sort of the first diplomatic volley toward them, and to ask them to please make assurances that this won’t happen again and to obtain an explanation as to how something like this could happen after we were under the impression that everyone was going to be playing by the same quotas and rules,” Outhouse said.

Increasingly, Greenland has come under fire from various groups for not following scientifically recommended quotas and for not setting or enforcing quotas, particularly with respect to the harvest of migratory birds, marine mammals, crabs and scallops. The home rule government’s attempts to place and enforce limits and encourage Uppik, a Greenlandic environmental protection group, haven’t succeeded in altering public opinion or action.

Within Greenland, hunters and fishermen complain about restrictions and the negative feedback they hear.

“We are tired of those condescending opinions about hunters, ever since … Uppik, was created,” Pavia Nielsen, a hunter from Uummannaq, recently told Greenland television.

But Greenland’s persistence in what many consider to be over-fishing could lead to other measures than criticism if its officials don’t answer Canada’s letter.

“When you start this process and you don’t get a response back and a commitment to work within the rules, then we can close our ports and it becomes an economic hardship to the country,” Outhouse said.

Last year, this tactic, said Outhouse, was previously used successfully against the Faroe Islands.

Deep sea shrimps are Greenland’s most lucrative catch, bringing in about $350 million in 1998, around two-thirds of its total export income.