Sometimes we don’t notice the news we should be reading. Last week an item not placed in the most visible position in the local papers announced a likely sudden, drastic reduction in the availability of cod.
It seems that a report from three years ago showing that cod stocks off New England were quite healthy has been replaced by grimmer figures cited here by U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts in a letter to two federal agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Commerce Department.
“The 2008 Gulf of Maine Cod Assessment showed a stock level of 34,000 metric tons of cod which allowed for fishing limits of 12,000 metric tons of cod,” Kerry wrote. “The new report shows a stock level of only 11,400 metric tons of GoM cod. We are told that this could require a fishing limit as low as 1,000 metric tons of cod and we are extremely concerned that this action would effectively shut down the fishery.”
Kerry followed up by advocating that New England fishermen be given federal help if further studies confirm that they must drastically reduce their take of cod. In Gloucester alone, says one expert on the region’s fisheries, 120 boats may be taken off the water if the fishing limits for cod take the hit Kerry describes.
This story deserves more attention than it’s likely to get. In terms of PR potential, cod isn’t a grabber like the Republican presidential candidates’ debates—like Newt’s divorces or the guessing game of whether a Mormon could be elected president. It’s less provocative than the question of whether Iran will really try to block the Strait of Hormuz. But it’s more important than either of those topics, because it’s part of the picture of our (and the world’s) food security.
In that regard, it’s important to keep two things in mind. The first is that the often-invoked dichotomy between the environment and the economy is false. First and last—though there’s a lot of confusing clutter in between—the environment, the source of all natural resources, is the economy. Cod is an example. The oceans are a source of nutritious, exceptionally healthy food that only needs to be harvested—that doesn’t require the inputs farmed meats require or generate the toxins they generate.
Wipe out cod and you set the stage for whatever replaces it to enter the cycle of overconsumption, overfishing and depletion—to go the way of cod and those other stellar food fish, the halibut and the Atlantic salmon. Then the fish departments in our grocery stories fill with yet more product from South America and Asia, wasting the energy it takes to transport them and depriving consumers in those parts of the world.
Second, the concept of food security needs to be incorporated more consistently into our idea of national security.
Millions of Americans are suffering from the economic downturn. They’re in danger of losing their jobs or their houses or both, and they’re vulnerable to upticks in the price of food. That suffering wasn’t caused by terrorism, which still fuels a national hysteria that’s put our civil liberties at risk while having nothing to do with the real stresses on the population at the moment. See protection of our food supply as part of the national security—a security undermined by fiascoes like the BP oil spill—and a new set of priorities takes shape, one that strengthens the country by safeguarding natural resources and human potential.
