U.S. delegates agreed with the quota, even though it will place pressure on
the already endangered wild runs of salmon returning to Maine rivers. Worse,
two environmental groups contend, the salmon will probably be sold primarily as
an ingredient in dog food.

“This decision to risk extinction of the few remaining wild salmon in Maine to
feed dogs in Greenland is inexplicable,” said Tom Grasso of the World Wildlife
Federation. The federation and the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF) also say
the fishery is not needed for subsistence, as are many of Alaska’s salmon runs.

“The commercial fishery on North American salmon feeding grounds at West
Greenland may kill the last of the United States’ wild Atlantic salmon, listed by
the government as endangered in 2000,” said Grasso. “We share ASF’s view
that the quota established by NASCO ignoring the scientists’ strong
recommendations and poses a threat to endangered salmon runs.”

U.S. delegates to the NASCO meeting in the Faroe Islands in early June
probably agreed to the quota because they thought the 55-ton limit was the best
they could expect, said Andy Goode, vice president for U.S. programs in the
Brunswick, Maine, office of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

“Maine people have the most to lose from this decision,” said Goode. “It is
usually thought that two-thirds of the Greenland fish are from North America. It’s
a mixed stock fishery that includes European and Canadian stocks as well, but
ours are the most depressed. So any catch of Maine fish could be devastating.”

Although Goode admits it’s not probable that all the Maine fish will be caught
in this fishery, it puts new limits on the chances for recovery of the wild stocks.

“The U.S. perspective is that the fishery off Greenland should be zero,”
Goode added. In 1999 and 2000 the Greenland fishery was reduced to a local-use fishery,
where Greenlanders could catch and sell the fish locally, but not out
of the country.

“Our stocks were worse than they had ever been. The wild Atlantic salmon
stocks bottomed out then,” Goode explained. “In the last two years they’ve
shown a slight uptick. The Greenlanders essentially feel they’d been sacrificing
and they were entitled to capture that uptick.”

Scientists estimate how many fish are needed to “seed” North American
rivers, Goode said. Any fish above that number are considered “excess”
according to the estimating model.

“The trouble with the model is that it doesn’t show the difference between the
healthy rivers in Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Goode. “We get only five
percent of the adult fish back that are needed to seed Maine rivers. So we
advocate for a zero fishery. This year, we didn’t get it.”

A Nova Scotia Conservative member of Parliament, Gerald Keddy, is calling
on the federal government of Canada to help protect wild salmon stocks in
Atlantic Canada by pushing for a closure of the Greenland fishery.

“Every fish caught off Greenland is one less fish returning to the seriously
threatened salmon rivers of Nova Scotia and Eastern Canada,” Keddy said. He
called on Canadian federal fisheries minister Robert Thibault to lobby for the end
to the Greenland salmon fishery before stocks become extinct.

The next round of negotiations over the Greenland salmon fishery may be
different, said Goode.

“ASF is trying to work with the Greenlanders to reach a conservation
agreement to ‘buy out’ the fishery” by giving Greenland money not to fish
salmon, Goode explained. “We don’t think we can get that permanently, but we
hope we could at least eliminate the commercial fishery for more than a year. It’s
too hard to negotiate these NASCO agreements every year.”

NASCO agreements are reached by consensus rather than voting. ASF
president Bill Taylor told reporters after the announcement that “The U.S. and
Canadian governments must now help ASF and the North Atlantic Salmon Fund
develop a conservation agreement with the Greenland fishermen that terminates
the commercial salmon fishery and provides fair compensation, while
maintaining a reasonable fishery for internal consumption.”

ASF is an international nonprofit organization that promotes conservation of
wild Atlantic salmon, with seven regional councils that have 150 river
associations as members throughout the North American range of the fish.