Thank you very much, Chair, and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity as well to join you today. It's been some years since I've been at the committee. I was here a few times many years ago. I've been in the industry myself since 1977, and initially in the Nova Scotia processing sector. Then I moved on to the processing sector in Newfoundland, actually. I'm now representing the large-vessel harvesting sector in Atlantic Canada.
Before I just make a few straightforward remarks on shrimp—my discussion is going to be focused entirely on shrimp—I want to thank my colleague Derek, who led the way, really, on some key messages. I won't deal with the messages directly in my opening remarks, but they flow from the whole concept of resiliency and that a stronger industry will provide stronger jobs, longer-term jobs, sustainable jobs, and sustainable businesses in Atlantic Canada, which we do need so desperately.
I'm here actually to speak in support of the licence holders in the traditional northern shrimp fishery, two-thirds of which are held by Labrador and Newfoundland and the Inuit, combined, with the remaining one-third held by Quebec interests, New Brunswick interests, and Nova Scotia interests.
Over the past four decades, these licence holders have invested about $400 million in their fishery, and the shell-on shrimp fishery by the large-vessel sector is worth about $250 million in annual sales. I also speak in support of the 800 professional men and women, primarily from Newfoundland and Labrador, who earn good wages working year round in this large-vessel shrimp sector.
I should give you some context that 800 person-years is about the same number of person-years in the inshore fishery in Newfoundland. They have longer jobs, but as Derek mentioned, for a very short period of time. So if you translate that into person-years, it's roughly the same number as employed in the large-vessel sector, which works year round.
While the licences are held in a number of different provinces, all but three of these vessels, I should state as well, operate from ports in Newfoundland and Labrador. Even among those three vessels that operate in Nova Scotian ports, a large number of their crews are from Labrador. In fact, one of those vessels is half-owned by the Labrador Fishermen's Union Shrimp Company, and two-thirds of their crew are from Labrador.
I'm going to take a few minutes just to make a few points, six of them, actually, for your consideration. I won't tell you what they are in advance, but I'll run through them as succinctly as I can, leaving most time, hopefully, for questions and answers.
Number one, you've been asking questions and have received information about interactions of the complex oceanographic and ecosystem conditions, and the interrelationships between those conditions and the productivity of shellfish and groundfish, in particular. We suggest that such interactions will not be adequately understood in our lifetime. While it's important that science makes progress towards understanding them, they need not be the primary focus of society.
I think here today I want to bring to your attention that with respect to northern shrimp, there are only two biologists who, along with some technical and supervisory help, are directly involved in supporting the $400-million northern shrimp fishery. If you combine the inshore and the offshore sectors together, there is $400 million in sales. We have two biologists trying to understand what's going on.
First and foremost, then, point one, we strongly recommend that DFO assemble sufficient scientific resources. They don't have to be brand-new people. They don't have to be new money, but surely we can find the money or redirect the money from other places toward helping support better management decisions, primarily in terms of developing a robust shrimp assessment model that can position this shrimp bloom over a 15-year period.
Again, the contraction we've seen in the last several years, and we'll continue to see, we don't have to understand all of it, but we could at least place it in an ecosystem context. Then you can produce some reliable projections of how much shrimp is going to be available in the future ecosystem for us to manage and for all the participants to partake.
This is absolutely needed. It's not something that we have right now. There is no assessment model for northern shrimp. We're driving this bus based on a survey index and we just follow it up and follow it down. There's no way to know what the prediction will be for the next year or the year after or the year after.
Point two is a related point. I'm not sure if you're going to hear it or not. It's from other sources. In any event, it's in the interest of some people to paint a picture of the northern shrimp resource as a single population, and therefore it should be managed as a single population. I want to take the opportunity at least to inform you that this is a proposition we don't accept. I believe DFO was here at least a couple of days ago. They would have told you where the main shrimp fishing areas are. Maybe they showed you with a map.
I'd like you to picture the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific. All these islands contain distinct aggregations of populations spread across thousands of kilometres of the ocean. There will be genetic similarity between the populations on some of these islands, but in biological terms these individual populations can go up or down quite independently from one another.
That's a very similar situation to what's happening in the northern shrimp stock complex. A number of different aggregations are out there. I'm told the genetic similarity exists between these populations, but the scientists inform us that these kinds of genetic similarities can occur from as few as 250 individual shrimp larvae drifting down with the current and settling in various places in areas to the south. This, in itself, doesn't affect the adult aggregations in these areas, but it's enough to give them the genetic similarity.
It's on this basis, though, that DFO has set up the various management units around these aggregations. In terms of human predation in the form of the fisheries, we can overfish or overexploit any single one of these aggregations, so we should make sure that we follow the TAC, the total allowable catch, and the quota allocations for each of these separately.
Point three, as you contemplate the changing ecosystems, we think it's important that you have a system of management adjustments that the fishing industry must make in response to the changing abundance. Derek talked more generally about the economic model, the need to have resilience in play. One of the key parts of an economic model in fisheries, given that it's a public resource, is that you have to have a stable allocation policy, without which you have organized chaos and ad hocery. It's impossible to build an economic model around that.
This system, a shrimp quota allocation policy, has been in existence in this fishery since 1997, largely using the same approach that existed with the northern cod resource. In that situation, when new entrants came into the fishery through the seventies and eighties, as the TAC declined, these new entrants had to leave the fishery before the allocation of the traditional participants, in this case the small boat fishermen, was to be reduced.
In 1997, Minister Mifflin, who was the minister of the day, announced the quota allocation policy for northern shrimp, whereby the new entrants, in reverse in this case, were largely the displaced cod fishermen after the collapse of the cod fishery. These new entrants were to be granted most of the total allowable catch increases arising from the increased resource, but on the condition that these new entrants would have to give back those increases in the same proportions once the shrimp in each one of these areas began to decline and return to more normal levels.
This quota allocation policy was announced without any objection from anyone in the fishing industry at the time. It has been endorsed and implemented by successive governments since then, both Liberal and Conservative governments.
Point number four, along with the northern shrimp quota declines will come financial and job loss. There's just no way around it. We support wholeheartedly the need for proactive and aggressive quota reductions, even though it will hurt our businesses. There's just no other alternative.
Within shrimp fishing area 6, which is the largest single one of these management units, the new entrants in this fishery received 93% of the quota increases from 1997 to the peak of the total allowable catch in 2008. So there was a total increase of 74,000 or 75,000 tonnes in that one area.