Last week’s fishery drama, with its angry fishermen and jettisoning of haddock in the Thames, was widely reported by the media and a gift for the headline writers. But there was little sign of push back on the bigger questions. What is the sea for, and who does (or should) it, serve and benefit? What is the most rational way to manage and share a marine environment which, while harbouring a much more granular mix of habitats than at first sight, is in another sense seamless? Fish don’t have passports! These serious questions need to be asked if we are to raise the tenor of the debate and inform the direction of the UK’s emerging new fisheries policy. So I have asked our fisheries expert, Dr Euan Dunn to outline our expectations for the forthcoming Fisheries White Paper.
In the run-up to the June referendum in 2016, the pro-leave Fisheries Minister George Eustice looked forward to the UK having “a more assertive role in promoting sustainable fisheries on the world stage” (http://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2016/05/02/leave-europe-george-eustice-uks-fisheries-minister-puts-marine-case-brexit/). We greatly welcome the aspiration to demonstrate global leadership on this front, but with the consultation on the UK Government’s fisheries White Paper expected imminently, as a scene-setter for the Fisheries Bill to follow, it’s time to assess how it should match the minister’s high water mark of ambition.
As a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure sustainable fisheries in our waters for the long term, the stakes could not be higher for the White Paper. The UK should not be shy in admitting that it championed the most recent reform of the Common Fisheries Policy which was a real step change in driving the green shoots of fish stock recovery we are now witnessing. The White Paper should capture the best of that but also build in innovative and robust, fresh thinking on how best to recover depleted stocks, fish them sustainably, and – unpopular as it is in parts of the industry – keep the hammer down on the grossly wasteful discarding of fish. The right balance of such measures will deliver the prosperous future for fishing communities we all want to see.
We can expect that the White Paper’s priority will be to presage not just the slim Fisheries Bill that enables fishing to be operational on Day 1 after the Brexit transitional period (in terms of fish quota arrangements, access to our waters, and necessary controls) but also to frame the expansive secondary legislation needed to flesh out the bold new world of UK fisheries policy. Underpinning this new framework we want to see explicit recognition that fishing opportunities are a public good for the benefit of all and managed with the transparency and accountability that this entails.
However, that our waters are not the ringed assets of the fishing industry speaks to a wider challenge for the White Paper. It is now widely accepted that the sea is not just a factory floor for the fishing industry, rather fish stocks – as a vital part of the food web – cannot be divorced from considering the marine ecosystem at large. This might seem obvious but it is a measure of the extent to which this spurious separation was made by decades of mismanagement that led to gross over-fishing, an issue only now being remedied. Fishing has also inflicted gross collateral damage on other elements of the ecosystem, but we now know much more about how to tackle such excesses. The recently published Defra 25 Year Environment Plan recognises this challenge and sets out the ambition to create a world-class fisheries management system that helps to restore and protect the marine ecosystem. It just takes political will to implement this vision.
And here’s where the White Paper can make real cut-through. What we need is not a fisheries manifesto with environmental add-ons but a truly integrated policy in which the environmental dimension is joined at the hip. In fisheries-speak this means that at the heart of the White Paper must be a topline objective to implement – just as the CFP already commits to – an ‘ecosystem approach’ to fisheries management and spell out the essentials of delivering that. Nothing less will match up to the UK vision for the marine environment of ’clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse oceans and seas’ (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-marine-policy-statement).
The RSPB seeks a White Paper that will pave the way to delivering on two ambitious challenges of an ecosystem approach. Firstly, a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the incidental snaring and drowning of seabirds, marine mammals, sharks and turtles in fishing gear. The UK has been in the vanguard of highlighting bycatch issues in Europe and now it has the chance to put in place its own world-leading, cross-taxa strategy, and to ramp up the monitoring needed to inform and enforce it. Secondly, the North Sea sandeel fishery, in which the UK has no commercial interest, continues to be managed in such a way that there is insufficient ‘set-aside’ of sandeels as prey for declining seabird populations. We see redressing this deficit as an acid test of ecologically sustainable fisheries and the White Paper is the window of opportunity for enabling it.
The UK is still playing catch-up with best practice in commercial fisheries elsewhere in the world, which requires that fishing adapts to nature, not the other way round. The White Paper must seize the chance to embrace that mantra.