You’d never know it by the press coverage it's gotten in the U.S., but "a livelihood that for centuries -- defined much of the region" off Canada's Atlantic provinces and Quebec "came to a close with the Canadian government's banning of cod fishing." Colin Nickerson reports that "faced with the near-total collapse of groundfish stocks," virtually all cod fishing is to end after "a devastating decline since the early 1990s of Newfoundland," the former codfish capital of the world. Fisheries scientists estimate it will be "decades before northern cod stocks that long sustained the Newfoundland economy will recover enough to allow commercial harvests." The industry that once produced billions of dollars for Atlantic Canada had shriveled to about $20 million a year industry, has now reached "historically low levels and show[ing] no signs of imminent recovery despite a decade of severe conservation measures," the paper quotes Fisheries Minister Robert Thibault as saying. Nickerson writes about explorer John Cabot who described "scooping them from the sea in baskets" and characterizes the collapse of Atlantic Canada's cod stocks as "one of the greatest environmental disasters of the 20th century." He reports no consensus among fishing experts, government officials, and fishermen on causes for the downfall.