No, I think this decision this year was made based on the advice we had this year, but also on our experience in other areas. For example, in area 13 we've seen what happens if we keep the harvest rate very high for a long period of time. We ended up with a problem in that area and we had to shut down the fishery. We didn't want to get into that situation in area 12, because it's too important.
In fisheries of this nature, even if we have the safety net built in by not fishing females and juveniles, we do have a situation where if we fish too hard on the fishable biomass, that is to say, the mature males, we could damage the stock to a point where it would not recover as quickly as it otherwise would, or it would recover over a much longer period of time. It's too important to have that risk.
What we decided to do, from a conservation point of view, based on the science that we had and based on the work that was done to introduce a precautionary approach in this fishery, that is to say where they were looking at biological limits that should not be exceeded, if you're not going to have a high risk of not recovering or recovering over a longer period of time--based on that information, which was available this year, it became evident that we had to take action to reduce the TAC and allow this population to have a quicker recovery than it otherwise would. In the past, we've taken time to lower it over a period of years, etc. We had the 50% rule on finfish, as you may recall, for cod—and look at the results that brought us. So we recognized there was a risk, and we had to take a very significant decision this year to overcome that risk and allow for a quick recovery.
We certainly recognize the hardship this causes. The hardship it causes this year, and probably next year, is going to be offset by future growth. That's our expectation. We didn't want to risk future growth by trying to manage the hardships over a couple of years, or three years, only to have a situation where we created long-term suffering in the southern gulf snow crab fishery.