Follow the crew of the Arctic Sunrise on their campaign for Marine Reserves in our North Sea Tour blog
Heading in to a beautiful and sunny Bergen on the Norwegian coast, this first leg of the tour is coming to an end. This is where some of us will disembark and new people will join to take our places. Sitting on the heli-deck as we slowly make our way past the spectacular scenery Hanne and I were summarising some of the things we had learned on the trip.
One thing we both have noticed is that a lot of the fishermen as well as others in the industry we have come across during these weeks seem to have had the idea that Greenpeace are against all kinds of fishing and therefore not interested in a dialogue with us. This is of course not the case, and as we started talking about this Hanne told me an interesting story of her first hand experiences of the modern changes of the fishing industry.
Here is Hanne's story:
I grew up very close to the ocean, in a town where many engage in fishery. For many of them fishing was the only type of income, and was the only thing they had ever known to do. Many of the fishermen fished for cod, and most of the fish were sold locally or was aimed at the Danish market. All towns close to the ocean had a small fishing fleet, and the vessels would go out fishing as the weather permitted.
This sounds like something your grandfather would say: "when I was young we could shovel cod off the ocean floor, they were as big as giant cars!" But it is not! It's me, and I am not even 30 years old. The way of fishing all changed rapidly in only 20 years and it still changing very fast, so what happened?
In the 70s and 80s the fishing fleet started to change. Large subsidies were giving to expand both the size of the fleet and the size of the ships. Both the gear and the devises for tracking shoals of fish were improved. Fisheries became very effective, fishing became industrialized, and the vessels became very expensive to run. As a result of the EU fisheries subsidies, the engine power of the fishing fleets increased threefold between 1970 and 1987.
Before the subsidies came into place all improvements on boats needed to come from the ocean. By this I mean that if a fisherman wanted to improve gear, build a better or larger boat he had to justify to the bank that he would be able to fish that much fish to cover his expenses and the loan for a larger or better vessel.
If for some reason he was not – well, he went bankrupt. In this way the number of fishermen and the efficiency of the gear adjusted itself to the actual amount of fish in the sea. With subsidies this all changed, and the fleet just became too big and too effective.
Through politics the whole nature of fishing changed. A large industry was favoured with large scale subsidies, resulting in the death of the small scale sustainable coastal fisheries and an overall sustainable use of fish stocks.
Coastal fisheries with a local angle and market makes much more sense. Fishing is essential to local communities and offers a range of jobs in the outer areas. Fish caught and landed locally not only gives jobs to fisherman; if landed and processed locally fishing has the opportunity to play an important role in employment and local growth.
In the way fishing is done today, and where it is headed in the future, local communities will be the losers. Fewer and fewer people are employed directly, and the industrial vessels don't need the same number of workers as smaller fisheries.
On top of that many of the fishing vessels fishing in the waters off Denmark, as well as in the Barents Sea north of Norway and off West Africa are not landed in local ports, and are not carried out by local fisherman. The vessels are out at sea for up to 10 days at the time, landing to trucks on land or transferred to freezer ships at sea. From there the fish are transported to large industrial ports.
In this scenario local communities are totally squeezed out and sustainability is traded away for a short-sighted aim of big profit.
Properly managed fisheries have the potential to boost local economy and local employment, and be sustainable. But political subsidies and a lack of will to deal with the problem has totally changed the nature of fishing. Fishing as I knew it, and as many others remember it, is perhaps only something older people will tell stories about in 20 years time.
