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fra knap 3.000 i 1982/83 til 1.200 i 1997, jf. forrige noter.
32. Antallet af offshorerelaterede fuldtidsbeskæftigede i
1999 var 2.838 (M. Hahn-Pedersen & Marit Jensen, op.cit.
Esbjerg 2002, s. 85). Antallet af erhvervsfiskere i 1967 an-
slås til 2.000, jf. note 4.
33. Vedsmand, op.cit., 1998 s. 231-36.
Summary
The Fisheries and Maritime Museum/Saltwater Aquarium
opened in 1968 on the occasion of Esbjerg harbour’s hun-
dredth anniversary. In 1968 there were 600 fishing boats in
Esbjerg, and in January 2005, 55 remained. In the 1960s
Esbjerg was Denmark’s biggest fishing town, and in 1967,
two thirds of the catch by value was industrial fish and one
third was edible fish. Over 2,000 fishermen manned the
Esbjerg fleet, and it is estimated that about 9,000 people
were employed in fishing and its associated businesses.
Trawling was the most important tool with 370 vessels
engaged in the industrial fishery in 1970, followed by
Danish seiners with 230 vessels.
Since 1970, practically all the Danish seiners have disap-
peared from Esbjerg, and more than half of them had alrea-
dy gone by the end of the 1970s. A main reason for this
development was that it became more difficult for seiners to
recruit new men. Young fishermen were more attracted to
the trawlers, which operated with bigger vessels with better
conditions for the crew, and where more money could be
earned. When the seine drum and the power block were
introduced in Danish seine fishing in the 1970s, fishing
with three-man crews became easier. But this meant that too
few new fishermen took up seine fishing, and many vessels
were sold out of Esbjerg. Other harbours on the west coast,
like Thyborøn, Hanstholm, and especially Hvide Sande,
arose and attracted the young people to fishing. By 1980 the
first support schemes for scrapping boats were introduced.
In Esbjerg’s industrial fishery, old wooden trawlers were
replaced by new and bigger steel vessels which could hold
bigger quantities of fish. The fishmeal factories in Esbjerg
attempted to concentrate on high quality fishmeal, but the
wooden cutters and the oldest steel cutters were not outfit-
ted to store the fish chilled, and many industrial fishermen
withdrew their vessels from fishing and left the business. A
fishery crisis in the 1970s led to more enduring changes. In
1975, the world market price for fishmeal fell dramatically,
and the EC introduced a ban on industrial fishing for her-
ring due to overfishing. Areas of the sea were also declared
out of bounds for catching Norway pout and sprat.
Prices did, however, recover, and during the 1980s
Esbjerg trawlers invested and earned good money. By the
mid-1980s the remaining small and medium-size trawlers
were highly dependent on combining industrial fishing with
fishing for cod, especially in the Baltic Sea. But the cod
population could not sustain the intensive fishing, and when
this fishery collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, many
fishermen found themselves in an impossible financial situ-
ation. Three out of four Esbjerg trawlers under 250 GRT
ceased fishing between 1987 and 1996, and most of them
were scrapped. The biggest trawlers in Esbjerg in the 1990s
combined industrial fishing for sand eels with fishing for
edible herring and mackerel.
Esbjerg Fish Auction did not survive the major changes
in fishing from Esbjerg. With the decline in seine fishing,
the auction’s turnover fell dramatically. From 1991 to 2001,
the value of the Esbjerg cutters’ landings at the fish auction
fell by 90%. The auction closed in 2002, and in 2003 only
three Danish seiners remained in the Esbjerg fishing fleet.
By 1995, Esbjerg was no longer dependent on fishing.
Fewer than 3% of the jobs in Esbjerg were in the fishing
sector. Simultaneously with the decline in Esbjerg’s fishery,
the city experienced strong growth in its industrial and ser-
vice sector, including the offshore sector. In the early
1990s, Esbjerg’s fishing sector was overtaken by the off-
shore sector in terms of number of jobs.
In 2003, a new law came into effect in Denmark which
made it possible to buy and sell fishing rights, ’individual
transferable quotas’, in the herring fisheries. Many trawlers
with quotas were sold out of Esbjerg, and individual new
ones arrived. In January 2005, only 32 Esbjerg trawlers
remained. Many fishermen were asking themselves: ’Does
fishing from Esbjerg have a future?’
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