Black Arts

Even the BBC has succumbed to a facile heroes and villains script which pits a crusading European Commission, aided by selfless environmentalists, against an unholy alliance of a rapacious fishing industry, supported by complicit or spineless ministers from those member states with fishing interests. The Commission’s proposals, according to this script, represent the pinnacle of environmental virtue. Anyone opposing the Commission’s drive towards mandatory obligation for all stocks to be fished at MSY, a ban on discards or tradable fishing quotas is either, craven, tainted, or wrongheaded.

The truth lies elsewhere.

Maximum sustainable yield may be a noble political aspiration but all fisheries scientists know that it is a flawed and limited concept when applied to the complex realities of multi-species fisheries. Fisheries managers would be foolish indeed to tie their hands to biomass levels that may be affected by many other factors than fishing. That is why the two simple but critically important words “where possible” were included in the Johannesburg agreement and should be retained now.

A system of mandatory EU transferable fishing concessions will be rejected by member states because it is exactly this type of inflexible top-down command and control approach to managing fisheries that lies at the heart of the CFP’s underperformance over the last 20 years. In any event, the evidence is far from convincing that transferable quotas lead, on their own, to fleet reductions. The most obvious European examples of TFCs have been preceded or accompanied by large scale vessel scrapping schemes using public money so it is difficult to see what caused what.

And calls for a discard ban that ignore the different reasons for discards including the EU’s own fisheries regulations, and therefore the need for a range of different solutions, amount to so much saloon bar bluster. Real progress has been made in reducing discards and the focus should be on maintaining this momentum rather an approach that is 98% PR gesture.

The story that you are not likely to read or hear about in the media is that, despite the hostile press, fishermen are working on a daily basis with fisheries scientists and fisheries managers, within a seriously dysfunctional system, to improve fishing gear and fishing systems. Neither are you likely to hear about the huge progress that has been made over that past 10 years to rebuild depleted stocks, or that many stocks are at or close to their maximum yield.

It is possible to turn the simplistic pantomime villain theme on its head by observing that the CFP’s calamitous record on resource policies, until the very recent past, has been intimately tied in to the Commission’s unswerving commitment to a top-down command and control approach, which is continued in these three aspects of the reform package.

And whilst the fishing industry is well experienced in working collaboratively with environmental NGOs in the RACs, the interventions of the Pew Foundation, an organisation brought into existence in the 1930s to oppose Roosevelt’s New Deal and export American values, has been to cheer on this failed approach.