I could spend a lot of time on that topic.
We are in the midst of a shift here right now in our industry. We've gone from a shellfish-dominated industry in this province, which has been very lucrative. Our industry last year was worth about $1.3 billion and snow crab and northern shrimp had historically been a big part of that. Now those stocks are declining, largely around an environmental shift, which is the overwhelming opinion on that, and we're seeing groundfish stocks recover, so there is a lot of dialogue around northern cod as we're seeing signs of recovery.
The thing we need to keep in mind is that the world has changed a lot in the last quarter-century since we fished cod and my personal view is that we need to shift from an industry that was largely a volume-based industry with a focus on employment maximization in the day—which served the purpose, I don't dispute, as I grew up in the fishing industry and saw the value in that—to an industry that's more value based and that has quality of employment as its major consideration. That's where technology and innovation are going to be a major part of it.
We have labour demographics in this province right now that are scary, to say the least. To think that in the next several years we're going to have an available workforce in this province to support the growing aquaculture industry, the transitioning capture fisheries industry, or hospitality or some other sector, it's just not realistic. Technology and innovation are going to have to be a critical part of the fishery of the future, in my view at least.
I'm just back from a trip to Iceland where I saw how things can work. In Iceland in the seafood sector, it's amazing to see how they're focusing on maximizing value throughout the value chain, in every aspect focusing on quality improvement. Their metric, which I referred to in my opening comments, is around increasing value per kilo of catch, increasing utilization per kilo of catch.
They're in the process now, over the next five years, of trying to get more value from the traditional waste stream of a codfish than from the fillet. Think about going out tonight and having a nice meal of pan-fried cod—and that's valuable, don't get me wrong—but there is a big effort afoot right now in Iceland to get more value from the gut content, the oils, the heads, and all the various components of the animal through innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and new business start-ups. It is the model of the future and it's the model we need to be adopting here, in my opinion.