The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing

On July 2, 1992, Canada closed the northern cod fishery overnight. About 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador lost their jobs in a single day. It was the largest single layoff in Canadian history, and it happened because too many fish were taken out of the sea for too long.

This is the story of how that happened, what it taught us, and why the cod’s slow return matters to anyone who eats seafood.

A fishery built on abundance

For centuries, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland held one of the richest fish populations on Earth. Indigenous peoples fished these waters long before Europeans arrived. When European explorers reached them in the late 1400s, the story they carried home was that cod were so thick you could lower a weighted basket into the water and pull it up full.

That abundance drew European powers across the Atlantic. For nearly 500 years, cod fed communities, built towns, and filled export ships.

Then the technology changed. Bigger boats, bigger nets, and factory trawlers fishing around the clock arrived in the 20th century. People believed the ocean was too big to empty. Some scientists and inshore fishers raised the alarm, but catches kept coming, and the assumption was that the fish would bounce back.

They didn’t. So many adult cod were removed that too few were left to replace themselves.

More than a fish story

The moratorium was supposed to be temporary. It lasted 32 years. Many people who wanted to stay on the island they loved had to leave and find work elsewhere, often in the oil fields of western Canada.

When we lose fish, the coastal communities that depend on them lose too. Fisheries collapse is a people story as much as an ocean story.

Three lessons from the collapse

Listen to the data, even when it’s inconvenient. Government scientists saw the decline coming. Political pressure to keep fishing won out.

Harming the ocean hurts the people who depend on it. Conservation and fishing jobs share the same goal: fish that can be caught for generations.

Recovery takes a very long time. Getting management right the first time is far cheaper than waiting decades for a population to rebuild. Northern cod never rebounded the way many expected, possibly because of the loss of spawning adults, shifting distributions, and a changing climate.

Two words that unlock every fish headline

Overfishing is an action. Fish are being caught faster than the population can replace itself, right now.

Overfished is a state. The population is already too small.

Put them together and you get four combinations:

• Overfishing, but not yet overfished: ease off now and the stock recovers quickly
• Overfished, but no longer overfishing: the damage is done, the pressure is lifted, and recovery is likely
• Overfished and overfishing: the worst case, with a small population shrinking further
• Neither: the goal

You’ll also see depleted, which is used differently in different places but generally means overfished or headed that way.

The term that causes the most trouble is fully fished, now called “maximally sustainably fished” by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. It sounds alarming, but it’s the target. The fishery is producing as much food and as many jobs as it can without shrinking the population.

Where the world’s fish stocks stand

In June 2025, the FAO released its most detailed global assessment yet. More than 650 experts from over 90 countries reviewed 2,570 individual fish stocks. They found that 35.5% of stocks are overfished. That’s more than a third, and it’s a real problem.

They also found that 64.5% are fished within sustainable levels. Because the best-managed stocks tend to be the biggest, 77.2% of all fish actually landed came from sustainable stocks.

The 90% trap

You’ve probably seen the claim that more than 90% of the world’s fish stocks are overfished or fully fished. The arithmetic works if you add the overfished stocks to the stocks fished at the sustainable maximum. But fully fished is the management target. Folding it into the same number as overfished makes the problem look hopeless, and hopelessness makes people give up. A third of stocks being overfished is serious enough without exaggeration.

What good management looks like

As Angelo Villagomez likes to put it, if you kill fewer fish, more fish will be alive. In practice, a well-managed fishery has:

• A catch limit set by scientists
• Rules to reduce bycatch, especially of endangered species
• Rules to limit habitat damage
• Data on how many fish there are, how long they live, how fast they grow, and how often they breed

One more ingredient matters: fishers at the table. People follow rules they help shape. In the United States, regional councils that include fishers help set catch limits. Where full stock assessments are too expensive, scientists have developed data-limited methods, so a lack of funding doesn’t have to mean a lack of management.

It works. The US has rebuilt 51 fish stocks since 2000. Pacific bluefin tuna was declared rebuilt a decade ahead of schedule in 2024, and US commercial catch limits for 2025–26 rose almost 80%. In the Northeast Pacific, 92.7% of stocks are fished sustainably.

The cod came back, cautiously

In 2024, Canada lifted the northern cod moratorium and reopened a commercial fishery with an 18,000-tonne limit. It was controversial from the start. Scientists warned the population had stalled, and inshore harvesters objected to offshore vessels being allowed back in. The limit rose to 38,000 tonnes in 2025 and to 59,000 tonnes for 2026, after the latest assessment placed the stock in the healthy zone for the first time since 1992.

A whole generation of Newfoundlanders grew up without a real cod fishery. Their kids may see one. The stock is still far below its historical size, and pushing quotas too fast risks slowing a recovery that took more than three decades.

Check one fish this week

Pick the fish you eat most and look up its stock status. Seafood Watch, the Marine Stewardship Council, and Ocean Wise all have guides. Your national fisheries agency publishes stock status pages, and in Canada, Oceana Canada’s annual Fishery Audit is a great resource. Ask three questions: Is it overfished? Is overfishing still happening? Is it fished at a sustainable level?

Once you know those words, you can read any fish headline the way a scientist does.

Takeaways

• Northern cod collapsed in 1992 after decades of industrial overfishing, and the moratorium lasted 32 years
• Overfishing describes a current rate of catch; overfished describes a population that’s already too small
• “Fully fished” is the sustainable target and a sign of good management
• The FAO’s 2025 review found 35.5% of stocks overfished and 77.2% of landings from sustainable stocks
• Strong management, good data, and fishers at the table rebuild stocks, as Pacific bluefin tuna shows
• Northern cod reached the healthy zone in 2026, and caution on quotas will decide whether it stays there

Listen to the full episode of How to Protect the Ocean, and pre-order Dr. David Shiffman’s Why Sustainable Seafood Matters using the link in the show notes.