Cod Wars of nationalism and party competition for Iceland and pressure from the trawling industry for Britain are reasons that both sides took actions that were of noticeable risk to their broader security interests. Interdepartmental competition and unilateral behaviour by individual diplomats were also factors, with the British Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries influencing the British government's decision 'more than the Foreign Office'. A 2017 study argues that both a combination of powerful domestic pressures on statesmen to escalate and miscalculation by those statesmen contributed to the outbreak of the Cod Wars. The study argues that Iceland won each of the Cod
Collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery Collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery In 1992 the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, John Crosbie, declared a moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery, which for the preceding 500 years had largely shaped the lives and communities of Canada's eastern coast. Fishing societies interplay with the resources which they depend on: fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes the fishery and society to adapt. In the summer of 1992, when the Northern Cod biomass fell to 1% of earlier levels, Canada's federal government saw that this relationship had been pushed to the breaking point, and declared a moratorium,