Why is no one brave enough to stand up to the fishing industry?

By George Monbiot. Abstracted from his blog.

I live a few miles from Cardigan Bay. Whenever I can get away, I take my kayak down to the beach and launch it through the waves. Often I take a handline with me, in the hope of catching some mackerel or pollock.

Last year I was returning to shore through a lumpy sea. I was 200 metres from the beach and beginning to worry about the size of the breakers when I heard a great whoosh behind me. I turned round. Right under my paddle a hooked grey fin emerged. It disappeared. A moment later a bull bottlenose dolphin exploded from the water, almost over my head. As he curved through the air, we made eye contact. If there is one image that will stay with me for the rest of my life, it is of that sleek gentle monster, watching me with his wise little eye as he flew past my head.

The Cardigan Bay dolphins are one of the only two substantial resident populations left in British seas. It is partly for their sake that most of the coastal waters of the bay are classified as special areas of conservation (SACs). This grants them the strictest protection available under EU law. The purpose of SACs is to prevent “the deterioration of natural habitats … as well as disturbance of the species for which the areas have been designated”(1).

That looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? The bay is strictly protected. It can’t be damaged, and the dolphins and other rare marine life can’t be disturbed. So why the heck has a fleet of scallop dredgers been allowed to rip it to pieces?

[Which of course is a really good question when considering Luce Bay – ssacn]

Until this Sunday, when the season closed, 45 boats were raking the bay, including places within the SACs, with steel hooks and chain mats. The dredges destroy everything: all the sessile life of the seabed, the fish that take refuge in the sand; the spawn they lay there, reefs, boulder fields, marine archaeology – any feature that harbours life. In some cases they penetrate the seafloor to a depth of three feet. It is ploughed, levelled and reduced to desert. It will take at least 30 years for parts of the ecosystem to recover; but the structure of the seabed is destroyed forever.

The boats are not resident here. They move around the coastline trashing one habitat after another. They will fish until there is nothing left to destroy then move to the next functioning ecosystem. If, in a few decades, the scallops here recover, they’ll return to tear this place up again.

The economic damage caused by these 45 boats is far greater than the money they make. They wreck all the other fisheries; not only because they destroy the habitats and kill the juvenile fish, but also because they rip out the crab and lobster pots they cross. We deplore slash and burn farming in the rainforests for its short-termism and disproportionate destruction. But this is just as bad.

Ever since the boats arrived, local people have been campaigning to stop this pillage. After months of dithering, in March the Countryside Council for Wales advised the regional fisheries committee to stop the dredging. The committee’s chief executive refused on the grounds that its powers “are not terrifically explicit” and “the precautionary principle is a vague term, and we don’t really know how we define it.”(2) He postponed any decision until June 12th – which is a fortnight after the season ended. In 24 years of journalism I have not come across a starker example of bureaucratic cowardice.

[And the Scottish public is being asked to blindly trust IFGs to manage our COMMON STOCKS on our behalf without us having any ability to question their decisions – ssacn]

What hold does the fishing industry have over our ministers and officials? Does it sink the bodies of their political opponents? Does it supply them with call girls and cocaine? The UK fishing sector has an annual turnover of £570m a year(3). This is less than half the size of the potato processing industry(4). Yet no one has the guts to defy it.

The EU now recognises that its fisheries management has been a disaster. Its green paper admits that 88% of European fish stocks are overexploited and 30% have collapsed(9). Its quota system encourages the dumping of millions of tonnes of dead fish at sea, while its efforts to reduce the fishing fleet’s capacity haven’t kept pace with technology. “In several Member States,” the paper reports, “the cost of fishing to the public budgets exceeds the total value of the catches.”(10) Last week, European fisheries ministers agreed a radical reform of the Common Fisheries policy by 2012, just in time for the extinction of the bluefin tuna.

Of course, as I have seen in Cardigan Bay, it doesn’t matter what they say they’ll do if no one is prepared to enforce it. Our marine ecosystems will continue to be ripped apart until governments stand up to the mysterious power of the fishermen [ who as you can see in the posts below – should be excused every control as they are struggling to make a living. -ssacn ]

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. European Council, 21st May 1992. Directive 92/43/EEC on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora; Article 6.2.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLEG:1992L0043:20070101:EN:PDF

2. http://endoftheline.com/blog/archives/334

3. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/fishing.asp

4. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/subsection_da.asp

5. http://endoftheline.com/

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/may/27/nobu-blue-fin-tuna-menu

7. http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE53D00320090414

8. European Commission, 2006. The European Fisheries Fund 2007-2013. http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/publications/FEP_EN.pdf

9. European Commission, 22nd April 2009. Green Paper: Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. COM(2009)163 final.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2009:0163:FIN:EN:PDF

10. ibid.

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