It's official: EU fishing policy is crazy

Posted by jossc — 14 August 2008 at 3:01pm - Comments

Norwegian coastguard video of the Shetland trawler Prolific dumping its catch in the North Sea

The crew of the Prolific discarding their catch

So at last the sheer waste involved in modern trawling has been captured on camera. Last week a Norwegian coastguard cutter filmed the crew of a Shetland trawler, the Prolific, openly dumping over 5,000 kg of cod and other dead white fish in UK waters. Now this footage is rightly causing a wave of revulsion in the media at the scale of unnecessary waste at a time of rapidly rising food prices and, ironically, when our own Prime Minister is telling us not to waste food.

Such discards are not isolated incidents. They happen routinely all around our coasts, but are almost never documented. They represent a scandalous waste of perfectly marketable fish. The reasons given are many and varied; the fish either are too small, the wrong species, exceed the fishermen's allotted quota, or will fetch too low a price at market. In the case of the Prolific it seems they were discarding tonnes of low-value small (but legally caught) fish in order to fill their quota with higher-value big fish. This time, though, the fact that fish caught in Norwegian sector of the North Sea were dumped in UK waters has outraged the Norwegian government, who released the footage in support of their demand that all fish killed must be landed.

So who's to blame? Current EU policy only sets quotas for fish landed at ports, so fishermen are free to keep trawling until they're happy with the value of their catch, discarding the contents of previous, less valuable trawls. Basically it's a license to 'maximise profit' The EU has been quick to try and characterise this as an isolated event, but ICES, the scientific body which advises the EU on fisheries quotas, suggests that as many as half of all cod and haddock caught in the North Sea are thrown back dead as discards. And the problem is made worse because EU quotas are set for single species, but trawling is an indiscriminate way to fish, so there will inevitably be a large percentage of wasted species caught up in the nets.

Basically the current system is crazy. The only real beneficiaries are the gulls that follow the fishing boats. We urgently need a radical overhaul of the way we manage fisheries, that includes making it a requirement to land all the fish that have been killed, and setting aside large areas as no-take marine reserves where all marine life, including commercially important species, can get some respite from relentless overfishing. The evidence suggests that where marine reserves have been established then, over time, fish stocks begin to recover and end eventually start to thrive again.

The award-winning environmental journalist Charles Clover, in his powerful attack on industrial fishing 'The End of The Line', made the point that if trawling were to take place not at sea, but on land in plain sight of everyone, then it would be quickly banned because the levels of indiscriminate destruction involved are so high that we would all be sickened by the sight. This Norwegian coastguard video has given us just a small taste of what that might feel like and, it seems, we can't stomach it.

About Joss

Bass player and backing vox in the four piece beat combo that is the UK Greenpeace Web Experience. In my 6 years here I've worked on almost every campaign and been fascinated by them all to varying degrees. Just now I'm working on Peace and Oceans - which means getting rid of our Trident nuclear weapons system and creating large marine reserves so that marine life can get some protection from overfishing.

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