Yes, the cod fishery is hugely important for my people and the communities. When the moratorium came on in 1992, like for many communities in this province—and maybe even more so in Labrador—there was a huge shock. It really struck our communities in such a visceral way because cod was really almost the entire fishery that we had on the coast of Labrador. You know, we had for some time then been involved in a small crab fishery that was being built and prosecuted on the coast of Labrador, and there were signs of things happening with the inshore shrimp.
You know, when the cod moratorium came on, it was almost like total devastation because our people really had no other fisheries to turn to. I mentioned that in my remarks. The cod has always formed almost a crucial foundational relationship with our people, both from a sustenance and cultural perspective and, of course, from a commercial perspective. When the stewardship fishery was introduced a few years ago and our people participated, you know, the energy started to come back into our communities because, of course, we started to experience declines as well, as I said, in those shellfish resources. The cod was rising up while those other resources were lessening. Of course, many people talk about the relationship between groundfish and shellfish and about whether the increase in groundfish will have an impact on shellfish and their production, so it was huge.
Like I said, in the communities, we have more people now involved in the fishery from a harvesting perspective. It's almost the first time that we can recall in our history that our people have been prioritized for the adjacent resources that are next to our coast. We don't know.... We've searched the records, and we can't come up with an allocation that has appreciated our adjacency, our dependency and what it means to indigenous peoples to be involved in commercial fisheries. We can see what happens when indigenous peoples continue to get marginalized. We've seen this throughout the Maritimes, for instance, in other fisheries, so this decision was hugely important.
What I'm hearing, sir, around this decision is not so much a decision around the resource itself and whether or not the 18,000 TAC is really about the impact that it's going to have on the sustainability of the resource. Really, most of the discussion is around management. It's around allocations and who gets what. You will note that even with the FFAW's own interventions and the positions that it has taken.
When the FFAW took a position around northern cod, it wanted much more than the 18,000. It wanted a bigger allocation, as high as 30,000 or 40,000 tonnes, you know. That's almost double what the minister brought in this June. The equitable part, of course, is that the people closest to the resource, dependent on the resource, who have historically not benefited from their own resources, should be prioritized and should have an equitable share of that resource.
It's hard to express in words just how meaningful this has been for our older fishers who have gotten back into fishing cod and for our young people who are, in many ways, engaged now in a new fishery.
When it comes to processing, sir, I can tell you that all of the inshore quota in 2J was landed in 2J and was processed in 2J. I can tell you also that the indigenous quotas will all be harvested as well.