Commissioner Maria Damanaki has put the catfish amongst the pigeons by suggesting a potential future ban on discarding fish from catches in a reformed Common Fisheries Policy. It's good to start thinking about these things and we welcome the initiative of Commissioner Damanaki. Catching fish that you then throw back into the sea dead is wasteful and immoral. That's the problem - but it isn't clear what is the solution.
I've never been to sea on a fishing boat - I'd quite like to have that experience one day - but I'm prepared to say that I believe that it is a tough life physically and financially. Sitting at a desk or exchanging the odd sharp word with the NFU, as I do, is a much easier life. But fishing is also a fairly crude activity in the sense that you can't see what you are catching (even with all the new technology now available) and the fish don't cooperate by sorting themselves below the waves into single species shoals of one size-class of fish. Dragging a net through the water tends to catch lots of things - some things you want and others you wish you hadn't caught. The unwanted catch may be unpalatable species or baby fish that would be much better left in the sea so that you can catch them later when they are bigger and after they've had babies themselves.
Added to which there have been years of over-fishing, resulting in over-depleted fish stocks and the march of technology means that we are always getting better at finding and catching fish - despite it being a tough life.
A reformed CFP is due to be in place by the 1st January 2013, so the RSPB will be working for radical changes to rectify the unsustainable elements of current fisheries practice. We need to ensure that the reformed CFP is based on ecosystem needs, as fisheries will only have a sustainable future if they operate in a healthy marine environment.
The RSPB is also concerned to see an end to the bycatch and subsequent death of seabirds, turtles, sharks and cetaceans in fishing gears of different types. Later this year, we will be talking to the public about additional ways to ensure the whole marine environment is better protected, for example campaigning to get marine protected areas in place throughout the UK’s seas to conserve important marine wildlife and seabirds.
But there is a twist to this fishy tale and that is that discarding provides free meals for seabirds. For long we have regarded it as an ironic consequence of unsustainable fisheries that some seabird species are booming. Fishing trawlers discarding fish will be surrounded by fulmars, gannets, skuas and gulls cashing in on a free meal. And the UK is the home to most of the world's gannets and great skuas so this isn't a trivial matter.
I'd rather have a properly managed marine environment that is providing a better life for fishermen as well as the marine life under the waves than have lots of seabirds feeding on discarded dead fish, but the world is a complicated place and we need to find solutions that will work at the ecosystem level. So, well done Commissioner Damanaki but there's still a bit of a way to go to produce the solution.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Banning discards should allow better monitoring of what by-catches actually include which will be valuable in providing data for fishery management.
Landings of fish that are not saleable on the human food market could perhaps be diverted to animal feed uses in order to relieve pressure on sandeel fisheries?
If fishermen are obliged to return to port with whatever they have caught rather than discarding until their holds are full of the most valuable fish, this will entail reduced earnings for them which they will quite reasonably object to (although ultimately an unsustainable industry is not in their interests either). Some form of financial compensation may therefore need to be built into any changes in regulations.
As Mark says, the fishing net is blind and the fish don't segregate themselves into single species, single age class shoals so there will always be some by-catch; design of fishing gear may help reduce this but I believe that sustainable fishery management must include designation of no fishing zones of sufficient size and in appropriate locations to act as nurseries for the fish populations.
Problems with by-catch of birds, dolphins, turtles etc are obviously much more than just European issues but occur worldwide, caused by fishing fleets that are not subject to EU rules. It will also be important to ensure that the UK Government and the EU apply suitable pressure to other fishing nations around the world to try to eliminate fishing practices that are particulalrly prone to causing this kind of by-catch.
Jonathan Wallace