The End of the Line

gentle instrumental music]

suspenseful orchestral music]

Danson: The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park in the Bahamas

is one of the oldest marine-protected areas

in the world,

a man-made sanctuary in the sea.

The waters teem with life,

from the smallest to the largest creature

in the food chain

because they are protected

from the most efficient predator our oceans have ever known.

suspenseful orchestral music]

Now, where do you--

- Well, l reckon if you fish off that point, cast it--

- Yeah, cast a fly straight out.

Well, what's that?

Probably a bass.

- Look, there! Hey, hey, hey!

Look.

Rupert, there's fish here.

l came into this because,

in a very small and very limited way,

l was a hunter of fish.

My first salmon...

my first salmon, also the largest l ever caught...

Here we come.

On a Welsh river, 23 pounds.

l was chuffed to bits to catch that.

Whew. Huge fin.

l have never been more proud of myself.

lt was the last that anybody caught on that beach

for years and years.

l don't think anybody's caught one as big as that since.

And l was triumphant,

but l also have felt guilty about that fish ever since,

because it was one of the last of a spring run

that now no longer happens.

Now, why were fewer of them coming back?

Well, l didn't know,

but l thought l'd better find out.

And that's really what set me off

on this journey to find out what was happening

to fish in the sea.

phone beeping]

- lt's Clover, Charles Clover.

l've got some queries.

Sir?

- What is the tuna that you serve?

Which ocean is it from, and how is it caught?

As a journalist, what changed my view of the sea

was when l walked into the wrong press conference

in the Hague in 10.

And this was the first presentation l'd ever seen

about the effect of trawling upon the sea bed

and upon those creatures that lived on it.

And what they said was that trawling

with a beam trawler was like plowing a field

seven times a year.

And l'm a farmer's son.

And l thought to myself,

''How many crops would grow

if you plowed that field seven times a year?''

And l thought, ''Not very much at all.''

And that changed my whole view of what was going on in the sea.

Danson: Our view of the sea has always been

that it is huge, beautiful, and inexhaustible.

The oceans are the common heritage

of all mankind.

And for billions of years,

they have been full of life.

These huge resources, these--

that we once believed to be renewable,

that our whole human history has led us up to now to believe

that are renewable are not renewable anymore

because of what we're doing to them.

And so our entire philosophical approach has to change.

lt's not gonna be the same in the future

as it was in the past.

That's where we are now.

upbeat music]

upbeat music]

- singing] We are going back on a different path.

We've finished all our duties.

Row with all your might.

lt'll be tonight.

Fish fingers, and they're beauties.

- What a hearty bunch, and what a crunch.

lt's truly fact, not fable.

Cod filets so fine, golden crisp every time.

- Come to the captain's table.

Danson: We never used to think about where our fish came from.

But in fact, they're wild animals.

And we found that out to our cost

for the first time in Newfoundland.

For centuries, the waters in northern Canada

teemed with unbelievable amounts of codfish.

Legend had it that you could walk across their backs

on the water.

The cod was so plentiful

that communities thrived on fishing.

As the years went on, technology improved.

The boats got bigger, and catches increased.

The bounty seemed endless.

Then, in 12,

the unthinkable happened.

all yelling at once]

ln St. John's tonight,

angry fishermen vented their rage.

They charged the room

where John Crosbie was holding a news conference,

but security would not let them in.

Danson: What had once been

the most abundant cod population in the world

had been fished out of existence.

- l've decided that, effective at midnight tonight,

there will be a moratorium on harvesting of northern cod

until the spring of 14.

- Either we cooperate in addressing it,

or there's gonna be no fish for anybody,

no fish for the Europeans,

no fish for the Canadians,

and an ecological catastrophe on our hands.

With or without you,

with or without you,

and not only me,

every fisherman on this island,

we're going fishing.

Danson: Overnight, 40,000 people lost theirjobs.

- The cod has gone, and l think within the context of cod,

particularly in the Canadian perspective,

is that this is a species

that has been fished for centuries and centuries.

Cod was the reason that people migrated from the U.K.,

from Europe, northern France in particular,

to Canada.

lt was because of cod.

Danson: The fishing ban brought the people to the streets.

They hoped that, one day, the cod would return.

The significance didn't drop,

didn't dawn on anybody till much later.

Today there are so few left

that they've got endangered status in Canada,

and the cod populations have not rebounded

despite a moratorium on cod fishing since 12.

Danson: ln 2007, this research vessel

set two lines, each with 1 ,500 hooks,

to find out how many cod were left in the waters

off eastern Canada.

On the first line, they caught one small codfish;

on the second, a small basketful.

The cod stocks had been depleted to such a low level

that they were unable to recover.

- For Newfoundland, for a community for which

the whole reason for its existence was cod,

there's this historical, ingrained element.

lt's part of society, permeates society.

And the loss of the fish

was basically akin to sort of a loss of soul.

And it still remains that 15 years later.

Danson: After the collapse of the cod,

a new breed of fishery scientist

started to investigate what had been happening

to all the fish in every ocean of the world.

Local catches of fish had been declining almost everywhere.

But what puzzled the scientists in 2001

was that the total world catch kept going up and up.

lt didn't make sense.

- The concerns that people had expressed

that local stocks were going down everywhere

but that global statistics were showing an increase,

that this was a discrepancy.

Danson: Daniel Pauly,

a leading expert in global fishing, was asked

by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization

to investigate this mystery.

- Daniel Pauly had the brilliance

to start examining why,

in the face of the evidence that you saw in front of you locally

and in the face of evidence like Newfoundland,

that the figures kept going up.

Danson: lt was when Pauly and his colleagues

looked at the reported catches from China

that they found their answer.

- For every part of the world, the reporting was right,

except for Chinese waters.

- When Daniel Pauly came to this department

and he said, ''l think they're wrong,''

l said, ''What do you mean they're wrong?''

He said, ''Well, it can't be that China's catching that much.''

- And they found that, actually, when you looked at

the biological productivity of the sea

and what we know about it everywhere else,

the Chinese figures could not be right.

They werejust made up.

They were made up by Communist officials

who only got preferment if the graphs went up.

Graphs kept going up because they kept making up the figures.

And it was a huge seismic moment.

- We concluded that they were so biased upward, so much,

that if you corrected for this effect,