Original Story from Pacific Wild – January 30, 2020

Vancouver Island Communities and conservation groups alarmed as DFO green-lights 20% herring quota despite management plan outlining HIGH risk of stock collapse.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Salish Sea, January 30th 2020 – Ignoring calls for a moratorium by over one hundred thousand Canadians, 53 Vancouver Island municipalities, First Nations groups, local government federations as well as its own scientists, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has just implemented a Management Plan which may ensure a further collapse of B.C. herring.

Herring in the Strait of Georgia has dwindled by 60% in the last four years. The last of five commercial herring fisheries regions on the West Coast of B.C. is on course to succumb to overfishing and mismanagement, owing to a 20% quota set by DFO and approved on January 29th, in a move seen widely by conservationists as a successful push by the industrial fishing lobby, which contradicts precautionary recommendations (“high potential to over-harvest…which may pose a risk to the stocks”), by DFO’s own scientists.