1st March 2013
By Bertie Armstrong, chief executive, Scottish Fishermen’s Federation
Fishing is a serious business, not least because it quite literally helps to feed the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) tells us in its biennial 2012 report on World Fisheries and Aquaculture that the proportion of the world’s protein supplied by fish products caught and farmed is 16.6%. For our world population of 7.5 billion heading towards 9 billion by the mid-millennium that source of food supply is important and must be sustained. At the moment, this is actually happening with production up from the 2010 report.
What is equally important is that our fisheries are managed sustainably. Achieving this aim is a complicated business, requiring scientific fact to guide responsible management decisions. This is what has been happening for the most part for northern European fisheries based in the north-east Atlantic, with the majority of assessed stocks now recovering. Indeed, fishing mortality is at its lowest level since 2000.
The Scottish fleet has contracted by over 60% in the last 10 years in what has proved a very painful restructuring period for the fishing industry. The Scottish fishing industry has also pioneered a whole range of initiatives in recent years to help conserve stocks including technical modifications to fishing gear that have dramatically reduced discards and real-time area closures to protect nursery grounds for fish. This is why we would really like the public to have a realistic view of the fishing industry, which is informed by fact. [Did HFW even mention this in the HFF Series 3? ed]
Unfortunately, this has most resoundingly not been the case with the latest Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight TV series where it would appear that the public are being well and truly hoodwinked.
In the first episode of this current series we were shown metal contraptions being dragged by tractors across sandcastles on a Weston-Super-Mare beach as a crude illustration what trawling supposedly does to the seabed. Had the programme’s attractive sand sculpture been constructed beneath the high water mark the first tide would have done a much more comprehensive demolition job on it – the demonstration was literally farcical.
But the starkest illustration of programme quality came from a British Antarctic Survey scientist, who was an unwitting contributor to the Fish Fight when it went to the southern ocean to look at the krill fishery. The fishery is damaging the ecosystem was the implication drawn by the programme. Well, no actually it isn’t. Cue Dr Ruth Brown from the British Antarctic Survey and her widely publicised letter to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall that was written after she saw how her area of expertise and the fishery were portrayed in the programme.
In her letter she reports from a definitive scientific study the facts that the fishery takes a krill tonnage less than 0.5% of that taken by natural predators. In other words, it is insignificant and to stop it for conservation purposes – the programme’s implication - would be the equivalent to ordering cessation of paperclip use in the UK to avoid making the national debt any worse. I recommend that you read Dr Brown’s letter to see the full list of evasions and distortions, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s reply for the central explanation that: “It is important to keep the story telling of a TV documentary clear and simple”. I disagree. I think it is much more important for a TV documentary to have an honest narrative.
Of course, the Fish Fight is colourful and has to this point kept Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and by way of a by-catch, the River Cottage empire, in the public eye. He is well sponsored – view the website of the philanthropic body the Oak Foundation and you’ll see that his film company KEO involved in the programme received just shy of half a million dollars in 2011 for such work. And I don’t imagine that Channel 4 is screening it for nothing. But wouldn’t it be much better and more productive for the well-being of our fisheries if such funding went into collaborative research and other projects that actually involve the fishing industry?
In summary, the Fish Fight is lightweight, populist advocacy scantily dressed as science. But that doesn’t help sustainable fishing – perversely it does the reverse.
We are hugely concerned that it provides unwarranted criticism that affects our general reputation in the eyes of the public. And if you have any questions about the industry or would like pointing in the direction of independent scientific evidence, please just ask us – www.sff.co.uk. And for the Southern Ocean, ask the neutral, objective, impeccably qualified people of the British Antarctic Survey.
Link to Dr Ruth Brown’s letter at:
