Source: Monbiot.com
Credits: George Monbiot
Dated: 2011-08-08

Mutually Assured Depletion

The EU, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes all blame each other for smashing the last great fish stock. All are wrong.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a year, after which no one will ever eat fish again. Almost everywhere, fish stocks are collapsing through catastrophic mismanagement. But no one in the rich world has managed them as badly as the European Union.

So when the EU tells Iceland and the Faroes that they should engage in “responsible, modern fisheries management”(1), it’s like being lectured by Atilla the Hun on human rights. They could be forgiven for telling us to sod off until we’ve cleaned up our own mess. Unfortunately, this is just what they’ve done, with catastrophic results.

A feeding frenzy is taking place in their territorial waters, as they rip into the North Atlantic’s last great stock: mackerel. As the seas have warmed, the fish have moved north. When they arrived in Icelandic and Faroese waters, those nations argued that their mackerel fishing agreement with Norway and the EU should be changed to allow them to catch more.

Norway and the EU refused, so Iceland and the Faroes tore the agreement up and each awarded themselves a unilateral quota of 150,000 tonnes. As a result, the north-east Atlantic mackerel catch has risen almost 50%, and is now well beyond the replacement rate(2). If the mackerel go, so do the many links of the food chain which depend on them.

No one is negotiating. The EU and Norway argue that Iceland and the Faroes are stealing our fish. But the mackerel migrating around the North Atlantic belong to everyone and no one. What matters is that the harvest is small enough to sustain the stock, regardless of who catches it, and at the moment no one’s blinking. Iceland and the Faroes will reduce their quotas when the EU and Norway are prepared to reduce theirs. Brinkmanship by all four parties is trashing our last super-abundant food species.

Last night (Monday 8th), Channel 4 broadcast the latest installment of Fish Fight, presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It urges us to switch from what supermarkets call the big five – cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns – towards more viable stocks, in particular mackerel.

It’s an engaging and powerful programme, and its attempt to prevent discards – throwing a large proportion of the catch overboard because of EU rules – is one that everyone should support. But what about its call to change species?

Our obsession with cod and haddock is trashing the seabed and many of the other species which live there. Species such as mackerel, herring and sardines reproduce quickly. Because they live in mid-water, catching them involves scarcely any bycatch or damage to the seafloor. “The Iceland and Faroes situation has given us a headache,” Fearnley-Whittingstall told me. “But are we going to punish local Cornish handliners for doing the right thing?”(3)

I started work on this article in the belief that he was wrong: that switching to less popular species merely transfers the pressure onto new stocks. But the research I’ve done has changed my mind. His campaign would make good ecological sense, were it not for the insanity of a fishing policy which cannot sustain even our fastest-growing fish.

The new pressure on mackerel stocks has nothing to do with Channel 4′s attempt to persuade us to broaden our tastes, which has not so far been successful. A preliminary analysis of sales by Maria McLean at Surrey University so far suggests no significant or lasting impact on any species(4). People have stuck with the big five. You wonder what it takes.

The new mackerel fisheries are finding markets far beyond Channel 4′s audience. Jógvan Jespersen of the Faroese Pelagic Organisation told me that most of the fish his members catch are sold to Nigeria and eastern Europe(5). There’s nothing wrong with this: the Nigerians have as much right to eat fish as we do. Jespersen says that the Faroese catch is being sold only for human consumption(6).

Iceland’s industry is another matter. The chart its fisheries ministry sent me shows that over one-third of the mackerel that ships in its waters caught last year weren’t fed to people at all(7). Instead they were turned into fishmeal, which is sold to feed chickens, pigs, other fish and pets and – even worse – to fertilise crops. It’s a disgusting, astonishing waste. Already that country has more or less wiped out its blue whiting stocks and killed huge volumes of herring and capelin for the same purpose.

But the government’s website tells us something else of interest: that most of the fishmeal and fish oil Iceland sells is bought by Norway and the European Union: the very parties complaining about Iceland’s plunder(8).

Any nation which really cared about fish stocks would ban both the production and consumption of meal and oil, except from the waste produced by fish processing factories. A basic principal of marine conservation is that fish should be caught only for human consumption.

As for the UK government, if it wants to establish any credibility in this debate, it should start by sacking its fisheries minister. In last night’s programme, Richard Benyon gave the impression of a man without the slightest interest in his brief, let alone any mastery of it. He was unable to identify the common fish species he’s supposed to be protecting. After admitting that he’s never been on a trawler, he wormed his way out of an invitation.

It would also implement the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s proposal: that by 2010, 30% of British seas should be no-take zones in which fish could reproduce safely, greatly increasing the size of stocks(9).

The score so far is 0.3%, and this government’s contribution has been to abolish the royal commission. It would address the issue highlighted by Emma Cardwell last week: that in 1999 the UK’s quotas were handed, free, to anonymous cronies, who then leased them for a fortune to big fishing conglomerates, wiping out the smaller boats(10).

Yes, let’s demand that Iceland and the Faroes stop wrecking our common stocks. But let’s not give the impression that we’re doing so only in order to wreck them ourselves.

References:

1. http://ec.europa.eu/commission

2. A forthcoming paper by Paul Fernandes, North East Atlantic Mackerel: long term projections, shows a likely rapid decline if current fishing levels continue. Watch this space for publication details: http://www.abdn.ac.uk

3. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, 28th July 2011. By phone.

4. Maria McLean, 31st July 2011. Graphs and commentary sent to me by email.

5. Jógvan Jespersen, 5th August 2011, by phone.

6. As above.

7. Press Office, Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture, Reykjavík, 8th August 2011. Chart and explanation sent by email.

8. http://www.fisheries.is/products/processing-methods/fish-meal-and-oil/

9. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, December 2004. Turning the Tide:
Addressing the Impact of Fisheries on the Marine Environment. http://www.fcrn.org.uk

10. http://www.guardian.co.uk

Source: Monbiot.com
Credits: George Monbiot
Dated: 2011-07-08

Jellyfish Rule

Have I just witnessed the beginning of the end of vertebrate ecology?

Last year I began to wonder, this year doubt is seeping away, to be replaced with a rising fear. Could they really have done it? Could the fishing industry have achieved the remarkable feat of destroying the last great stock?

Until 2010, mackerel were the one reliable catch in Cardigan Bay in west Wales. Though I took to the water dozens of times, there wasn’t a day in 2008 or 2009 when I failed to take ten or more. Once every three or four trips I would hit a major shoal, and bring in 100 or 200 fish: enough, across the season, to fill the freezer and supply much of our protein for the year. Those were thrilling moments: pulling up strings of fish amidst whirling flocks of shearwaters, gannets pluming into the water beside my kayak, dolphins breaching and blowing. It was, or so it seemed, the most sustainable of all the easy means of harvesting animal protein.

Even those days were nothing by comparison to what the older residents remembered: weeks on end when the sea was so thick with fish that you could fill a bucket with mackerel just by picking them off the sand, as they flung themselves through and beyond the breaking waves while pursuing their prey.

Last year it all changed. From the end of May to the end of October I scoured the bay, on one occasion paddling six or seven miles from land – the furthest I’ve ever been – to try to find the fish. With the exception of a day on which I caught 20, I brought them back in ones or twos, if at all. There were many days on which I caught nothing at all. There were as many explanations as there were fishermen: the dolphins had driven them away, the north-westerlies had broken up the shoals, a monstrous fishmeal ship was stationed in the Irish Sea, hoovering up 500 tonnes a day with a fiendish new vacuum device. (Despite a wealth of detail on this story I soon discovered that no such ship existed. But that’s fishermen for you). I spoke to a number of fisheries officials and scientists, and was shocked to discover that not only did they have no explanation, they had no data either.

So I hoped for the best – that the dearth could be explained by a fluctuation of weather or ecology. When the fish failed to arrive at the end of May I told myself they must be on their way. They had, after all, been showing off the south-west of England – it could be only a matter of time. I held off until last weekend.

The conditions were perfect. There was no wind, no swell, and the best water visibility I’ve ever seen here. I looked at the sea and thought “today’s the day when it all comes right.”

I pushed my kayak off the beach and felt that delightful sensation of gliding away from land almost effortlessly – I’m so used to fighting the westerlies and the waves they whip up in these shallow seas that on this occasion I seemed almost to be drifting towards the horizon. Far below me I could see the luminous feathers I used as bait tripping over the seabed.

But I could also see something else. Jellyfish. Unimaginable numbers of them. Not the transparent cocktail umbrellas I was used to, but solid white rubbery creatures the size of footballs. They roiled in the surface or loomed, vast and pale, in the depths. There was scarcely a cubic metre of water without one.

Apart from that – nothing. It wasn’t until I reached a buoy three miles from the shore that I felt the urgent tap of a fish, and brought up a single, juvenile mackerel. Otherwise, though I paddled to all the likely spots, I detected nothing but the jellyfish rubbing against the line. As I returned to shore I hooked a greater weever – which thrashed around the boat, trying to impale me on its poisonous spines. But that was all.

Is this the moment? Have I just witnessed the beginning of the end of vertebrate ecology here? If so, the shift might not be confined to Cardigan Bay. In a perfect conjunction of two of my recent interests, last week a monstrous swarm of jellyfish succeeded where Greenpeace has failed, and shut down both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station in Scotland.

The Israeli branch of Jellyfish Action pulled off a similar feat at the nuclear power station in Hadera this week.

A combination of overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has creating the perfect conditions for this shift from a system dominated by fish to a system dominated by jellyfish.

If this is indeed what we’re seeing, the end of vertebrate ecology is a direct result of the end of vertebrate politics: the utter spinelessness of the people charged with protecting the life of the seas. In 2009 the Spanish fleet, for example, vastly exceeded its quota, netting twice the allowable catch of mackerel in the Cantabrian Sea, and no one stopped them until it was too late.

Last week, the European Commission again failed to take action against the unilateral decision by Iceland and the Faroes to award themselves a mackerel quota several times larger than the one they agreed to, under their trilateral agreement with the EU and Norway. Iceland and the Faroes have given two fingers to the other nations, and we appear to be incapable of responding.

The mackerel haven’t yet disappeared from everywhere, but my guess is that the shoals which, since time immemorial, came into Cardigan Bay, were a spillover from the mass movements up the Irish Sea. As the population falls, there’s less competitive pressure pushing them towards the margins. Without data, guesswork is all we’ve got.

I desperately hope it’s not the case, but it could be that the fish that travelled to this coast in such numbers that it seemed they could never collapse have gone.