The international market was there. The doors were shut. We had products. The Newfoundland seal industry, and the Canadian seal industry people in general, was a success story. We built this industry from a few thousand in the eighties up to years when we harvested 350,000 to 360,000 and could have harvested more. The demand was there. The customers were there. The markets were being addressed.
We had four processing companies on the island that produced seals, competed for the seals and put a great value onto the seals. When we lost our access to the market, those companies generally shut down, one after the other, and right now we only have one. As someone stated earlier, when asked what we need, we need access to markets because the customers are there. The customers are the general population out there who could walk into the store, look at a product and make a personal decision on whether or not they want to buy that product. That has never been the problem. The problem has always been the access.
Our success in Newfoundland from building a seal industry after the whitecoat ban of the 1980s was wonderful. The communities were ecstatic about the money that was being generated, the extra money and the plant workers working all the time. It was providing the international marketplace with the products. These products weren't being sold here in Canada. For the last few years, the government has invested greatly in the Canadian market, and for some reason, I guess, it has not taken a foothold. The only thing that's keeping our industry alive today is a small Canadian market. Our main market has been international; it always has been and probably always would be.
The industry needs assistance in the ability to access the marketplace. That is what it is. We talk about DFO and its studies and all the reports that have been written. I was at the seal forum in November when Minister Murray made a statement that it was the first official seal forum. That's not true. I was at the much larger seal forum in 2002, when the industry made recommendations that were going to be required to have attention and to be addressed in order that we wouldn't be in the state we are in today, because industry predicted all of this.
For everyone's information, we, the Canadian seal industry, were the first industry in Canada to adopt the precautionary approach framework for dealing with the seal population. At the time, in 2002, it was somewhere in the vicinity of 4.8 million to 5.2 million animals. It was providing us, at the time, with a total allowable catch of somewhere in the vicinity of 320,000 animals per year. That did somewhat control the population, but it still increased.
Now we're at a point where our population of seals is up around the tens of millions. One gentleman earlier said that we'd need a harvest of 600,000 to control it. That would be only to control it. We need a number much larger than that now for the protection that our ecosystem and our fish stocks need. It's only a matter of time.
I sat here this evening as a favour to a person to come here and do this, because I've seen so much of this in the last 30 years that I'm full to the chin, pretty much. We need action. The action right now is a cull to control the population on an ecosystem basis.
If you had an aquarium and you had fish growing in it and you tossed in a seal, you know what he'd do. If you need to do studies on what seals eat.... Seals are the most opportunistic feeders in the ocean. They will eat whatever is there in that vicinity. All of the studies previously, going back some 30 years, may have been taken from seals in the bays when there were no capelin or no cod and the seals were living off the fat reserves that are in their fat—