Moratorium on commercial fishing of the Beaufort Sea
On August 20, 2009 United States Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke announced a moratorium on fishing the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska.
According to Locke:
There is no widespread commercial fisheries in those waters now.
The moratorium was imposed in anticipation that global warming would make those waters accessible to commercial fisheries.
The moratorium stirred controversy in Canada because the region where the USA announced the moratorium included a large wedge-shaped region of disputed waters.
Randy Boswell, of Canada.com
wrote that the disputed area covered a section of the Beaufort Sea.
He wrote that Canada had filed a "diplomatic note" with the US in April when the USA first announced plans for the moratorium. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, called the U.S. moratorium over the disputed waters in the Beaufort Sea as the "largest encroachment on Canadian territory in our history."
