Lögberg-Heimskringla - 15.07.1994, Blaðsíða 1

eimskrmgla
The lcelandic Weekly
Lögberg Stofnaö 14. janúar 1888
Heimskringla Stofnaö 9. september 1886
108. Árgangur
108th Year
Publications Mail Registration No. 1667
Föstudagur 15. júlí 1994
Friday, 15 July 1994
Inside this week:
Summer Solstice Days in Baldur.......2
Jennifer Roed Wins Top Honor........3
Filling An Air Pocket.................4
From BoatTo Bar.......................5
Einar's Anecdotes.....................6
Children's Corner.....................7
Númer 26
Number 26
lcelandic
News
Inventive Birds:
Snow was
still
on the ground in
Olafsfjörður, in the
middje of May.
The remains from
the heavy snowfall
of last winter. This
has created diffi-
culty for the birds
riL4
eggs. A certain
thrush (robin) couple,
however, were not dís-
couraged. They made
their nest in a mountain
jeep belonging to Hinni
who líves in Tungata.
Hinni received hís visitors
well even though they
were uninvited and cancelled his last moun-
tain trip. He parked his jeep and that is how
it will remain until the chicks are hatched.
Rotting wealth off íceland's
coasts!
B Deepfried lce-
. landic sea-weed re-
ceived rave reviews
at the Food Show
held in the middle of
May, ín Kópavogur.
Sea-weed is consid-
ered a delicacy in
many parts of the
world, with the great-
est demand in Asiá,
where it is quite expensive. In Japan, for
example, the annual consumption is 700,000
tonnes. In lceland it has maínly been used for
animal feed and for making food fibre mater-
ial. The Research Institute for the fish índus-
try is investigating the possibility of produc-
tion and preparation of lcelandic sea-weed
both for export and the home market. Sea-
weed is nutritious food, low in calories, rich
in vitamines and mjnerals as well as fiber
which soak up cholesterol and heavy metals.
At present one factory is utilizing sea-weeds
in lceland where it is dried, ground and fibre
material made from it, used in food and
medicine.
Silver for Magnús Scheving:
■ Magnús Scheving received silver at the
World Competition in Aerobics in Japan at
the end of Ápríl. Scheving and the Japanese
Kemchiro
M o m u r a ■r'í*'
were far *
ahead witli g*
M o m u r a B '
'eceiving PpT
9 I6, in the
f i n a i s gljT
a 9 ain s t . ,r
Scheving's
9.12 - and therebv defendina his World
GUNNUft ISFBLD
The Vanishing Cod

Dwindling stocks
causing hardship
on island

* *.
Agústsson’s ship,
The Otto Wathne. getting
ready to tish for prawns in
the Ftemish Gap.
EYKJAVÍK — It is a bit
ironic that although
Iceland has fought several
cod wars over the last few
decades, Icelanders them-
selves don’t eat much of the fish,
regarding it as fit mainly for foreigners.
They prefer haddock and halibut.
The term cod war is a misnomer in
any case, since the so-called wars were
actually territorial, fought over
Iceland’s unilateral extensions of its
territorial waters.
The lowly cod, however, is essential
to the Icelandic economy because it
forms a large part of the nation’s
seafood exports to Europe and North
America £md the dwindling of the cod
stocks has caused hardship here as it
has in Atlantic Canada.
The Icelanders appear to be
addressing the problem more aggres-
sively, however, perhaps because
unlike Atlantic Canada, they have no
Ottawa to fall back on and to help
them out. On their isolated island in
the North Atlantic, they are entirely on
their own.
Strained relations
Currently they are fishing around
Svalbard, or Spitzbergen, which has
seriously strained relations with
Norway, which claims jurisdiction over
the surrounding waters, and resulted in
yet another cod war. Last year they
purchased several trawlers in
Newfoundland and took them back to
Iceland to be refitted; according to
Prime Minister Davið Oddson, they
may be used to fish off the coast of
South America. In fact, they will go
wherever they can find fish.
There are different opinions about
why the cod seem to have disappeared.
Like many fishing captains, Páll
Ágústsson doesn’t believe that the cod
stocks are shrinking. An increasing
population of seals and whales are cut-
ting into it, he thinks, and Iceland
should resume whaling and Canada
should cull its seal herds, but for the
most part the cod are still there —
somewhere; we just have to find them.
Interviewed while getting his ship,
the Otto Wathne, ready to fish for
prawns in the Flemish Gap east of the
(Grand Banks, he argued they have
simply moved: “As long as he can
remember, when there have been fish
in the Grand Banks there have been
none in the Barents Sea and when
there have been fish in the Barents Sea
there have been none in the Grand
Banks. Any fisherman can tell you
that.”
‘That is complete nonsense; I have
never heard such nonsense,” replied
Jakob Jakobsson, director of marine
research for the govemment in Iceland
in Reykjavík, who has been counting
fish and tracking them all around the
ocean for 20 years by any means he
could find.
When the herring started to dwindle
and he was having trouble finding
enough to count, he used killer whales
as guides; they feed on the herring and
would lead him to them.
To refute Ágústsson, he produces a
host of charts and graphs and statistics.
“In the 1960s,” he said, “there were
many cod in the ocean off
Newfoundland, in Icelandic waters
and in the Barents sea.”
The fishing captains want to believe
what Ágústsson argues, he said, but
there can be no doubt that the cod are
now not only fewer but smaller than
they were in the 1960s. In fact, it
appears that the same thing is happen-
ing to the cod today as happened to
herring in the 1960s, when they all but
disappeared.
The bad news for the fishermen, he
said, is that the herring returned in har-
vestable numbers just last month, 30
years after they disappeared from
Icelandic waters: without better man-
agement of the fisheries, the cod could
take almost as long to recover.
Overfishing, Jakobsson said, is the
main reason for this, but there are
other factors as well. He agrees with
Captain Ágústsson that increases in the
population of whales and particularly
seals are partly responsible for this. “If
you harvest only one element (fish) in
the North Atlantic ecosystem, you
throw off the delicate balance.”
Cont’d. page 3