Research for PECH Committee - Common Fisheries Policy and BREXIT

This is the reference document of the Workshop on “Common Fisheries
Policy and BREXIT” of 21th June 2017, organised by the Committee on
Fisheries (COMPECH) and the Policy Department B (PECH Research) of the
European Parliament.

It is structured in three parts:

1. Legal framework for governance
2. Trade and economic related issues
3. Resources and fisheries

BREXIT, ENGOs & THE FISHING INDUSTRY

Assistant chief executive, Dale Rodmell, reflects on Brexit, the disconnect between industry and the Common Fisheries Policy and the influence and role of environmental NGOs.

Fishing became the political poster child for the Brexit campaign. It's easy to see why. More than in any other area of EU policy, the story of fisheries epitomises a sense of lost control and real loss as our industry bore the brunt of year after year of cuts at the hands of a distant invisible bureaucracy the industry gave the impression that it was oblivious to the livelihood needs of fishing communities. Changes to improve things to better connect industry to policy have also seemed slow and insufficient. In order to better understand the issues we now face following the Brexit vote it is worth examining the history of involvement of the fishing industry in the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and in more recent times the emergence of environmental NGOs as a significant influence.

The CFP Disconnect

Up until 2004 the only direct engagement the industry had with the CFP machinery was through the Advisory Committee for Fisheries and Aquaculture (ACFA), a forum of industry and representatives of fish workers that advised the Commission across the whole spectrum of European fisheries. As a single forum that only met occasionally it was grossly inadequate for the task of covering the whole spectrum of European fisheries. The Regional Advisory Councils (now Advisory Councils) were first launched in 2004

The first efforts to change this state of affairs followed the crises of the 1990s that saw drastic cuts to whitefish quotas and to the fleet. From the discontent that was generated the 2002 CFP reform saw the introduction of the Regional Advisory Councils (now Advisory Councils). These were much more significant forums with secretariats to support their work and they gave the industry a much more robust platform at a more appropriate scale to influence management decisions, alongside other stakeholders. But the Advisory Councils were not the be all and end all. Advice is just that. It has no direct role in setting management objectives and operational rules. There was wide recognition that involvement still needed to be deepened further.

The opportunity for that came with the regionalisation agenda under the latest reform. At the start of the process the Commission, in its Green Paper of 2009, had started out accepting that there was still something wrong with the relationship between fisheries governance under the CFP and industry. It said that:

"Very little can be achieved if the forthcoming reform fails to motivate the catching sector, the processing and seafood chain as well as consumers to support the objectives of the policy and take responsibility for implementing them effectively. It is critical to the success of reform that industry should understand the need for it, support it and have a genuine stake in its successful outcome. In a mostly top-down approach, which has been the case under the CFP so far, the fishing industry has been given few incentives to behave as a responsible actor accountable for the sustainable use of a public resource. Co-management arrangements could be developed to reverse this situation." (CFP Reform Green Paper, 2009)

Almost as soon as it was printed, however, this whole agenda was all about to be side-lined. In contrast to what the Commission technocrats were thinking, Commissioner Damanaki had spent her time in office either aloof or hostile to industry. The European Parliament with its newly established powers under the Lisbon Treaty had little affinity for grand ideas of delegating responsibility to others when it had just been given responsibility itself. That, combined with the vast majority of MEPs having an almost complete absence of knowledge of the fishing industry, but their ears open to anyone who would tell them what to think, set the stage for the next command and controllers charter that we now see in the current CFP.

How did it turn out that way? Enter the eNGOs. Many newly self-appointed as the guardians of our marine resources and ready to fight on the beaches with a war chest mostly convoyed over from the USA. They got to work firstly with a doom-mongers blitz. Despite ongoing progress with cutting fishing mortality and the start of recovery being seen across the NE Atlantic stocks, according to them stocks were in free fall and heading for extinction - remember the 100 cod left in the North Sea story, and the 2048 end of line hype? In this altered reality, the inference was that industry couldn't be trusted with the public's precious natural resources. They had pillaged them, and always hoodwinked their politicians into agreeing short-termist decisions, right? And there was an urgency to put it all right, if not by 2015, then by 2020 at the latest, no exceptions. Accompanying this narrative was heavy lobbying of the European Parliament to introduce a strict set of regulation to be contained in the core legislation, providing little flexibility for application at the regional level (see figure below).

Then, in the midst of it all, along came one of our celebrity campaigning chefs to lob in a discards PR hand grenade, straight into Commissioner Damanaki's lap. It didn't matter that a lot of the discards were generated by the regulations themselves and that significant progress had already been made to reduce them. In a matter of weeks the industry was handed it back, in-kind; the obligation to (nearly) not throw a single fish over the side...whilst trying to do a circus act to remain within the constraints of all of the other regulations. Actually, the circus act was left for another day - too hard for the hard working legislators to think about at that time. The megalomaniacs were back in charge, and once the deal was signed, congratulating themselves on the fantastic job they had done.

Creating the next command and controller's charter: Left, MEP's eNGO crib sheet during the Parliament vote in 2013. Right, an explanation of what the amendments mean in practice. The first two were adopted in the final reform.

Indeed, a number of them still believe it and continue to press for the toughest interpretation of the reform text. They continue to try to persuade decision-makers that the scientists have it wrong over setting stock biomass levels consistent with sustainable yields. They continue to lambast Ministers for TAC decisions that are different from the single stock advice without acknowledging their role in a legitimate process to consider, beyond this advice, balancing the pace of reaching MSY with mixed fishery considerations and the likelihood of generating large quantities of discards. And they are working to try to set up a police state of electronic monitoring to hold the whole thing together.

Shared Objectives, Wrong-headed Delivery

To be clear, the NFFO has not been against the policy objectives of the CFP. Maximising long-term yields is a good thing, as is minimising discards. But fisheries management can't sit in an ivory tower and hand down these objectives as prescriptive management regulations attached with "plucked out of the sky" non-negotiable deadlines without an appreciation of how to deliver at sea and manage change, whilst maintaining viable businesses. Tighter management has thus come along just when we have been witnessing of stock recovery on the grounds. Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) targets have delayed increases to quotas. Across fisheries that had received severe cuts the evidence base which is dependent upon the operating fisheries themselves, has also been undermined resulting in the increased application of the precautionary approach, which leads to reduced quotas simply due to lack of knowledge on stock status. New stocks such as skates and rays have been placed on quota but again with limited evidence, they too have been subject to successive cuts as a consequence of the precautionary approach. All of these situations have led to more instances where fishing opportunities are out of sync with stock abundance. Add the landing obligation (discard ban) to all of this and we are heading for a crunch as the responsibility for the mismatch between available quota and abundance is transferred to the fishing business with the expectation that they can somehow perform the circus act and avoid breaking the law. And if they can't, they tie up and go bust. That's the prospect of what so-called "choke" stocks mean when the available quota of one stock has been used up but the stock can't be avoided and so fishing for other species has to stop.

eNGOs and Brexit

The Brexit vote demonstrated in spectacular fashion that keeping those who are affected by decisions remote from decision-making and marginalised from the agenda, that politics can and does come back to bite. Of course, fisheries were part of a much wider leave narrative over governance, identity, democracy and exclusion, but it was used graphically in the Leave campaign to make the point.

In the wake of the vote, there is likely to be a lot of soul-searching in the EU about how to better connect the supra-national institutions to national populations. But the influence of eNGOs that was prominently visible in the latest CFP reform, and their habit of lobbying for top-down command and control environmental policy from the centre, hasn't gone away with the vote. eNGOs are not accountable to the electorate. And in Europe, the UK probably has an eNGO community that is more active than in any other nation.

eNGOs didn't want Brexit. A large amount of environmental policy is attached in some way to EU governance, and as some have argued in our EU referendum blog, fisheries and other environmental issues go beyond the reach of single countries. But already some are calling on the UK government to be tough on regulation and others are seeking to disenfranchise our industry by claiming that we fail to understand sustainability and the conservation of natural resources upon which our industry depends.

Rubbish. A cursory glance at our website and the work we are involved in will prove that is not the case. Such an assertion reflects just the sort of attitude of blaming the people for their lot and trying to marginalise them from decision-making that is the cause of political ruction, certainly not a solution to it. Such eNGOs should hold a mirror up to themselves about what the vote represented. I appreciate, nonetheless, that so far in talking about eNGOs I am lumping together a great number of organisations and stereotyping them as one. That is unfair. Not all are concerned with implementing legalistic regulatory frameworks from the centre and not all work to demonize and control the fishing industry without having anything to do with it. Indeed, some have a more collaborative side. The Advisory Councils have been pioneering in bringing eNGOs together with industry. In the fruits of the consensus-based advice that they produce, they demonstrate what is possible.

Working in Partnership

There is also a growing number who are beginning to work directly to support industry. We in the industry need to foster these relationships, whilst continuing to call out those who would rather work in the shadows and transmit falsehoods about our industry, ferment division and continue to pedal the doom-mongers narrative in order to justify their next grant or charitable donation.

There is a lot to do that could be achieved working in partnership. We must strive to improve the ability of industry to generate its own evidence to be able to help to plug the gaps in our fisheries knowledge base. We need to press ahead with management approaches that incentivise industry, undertaking trials and ensure that what works is adopted more widely. We need to create a policy environment where fisheries management is not all about compliance with the rules, it is about shared objectives, shared management, and mutual buy-in. We must show how that is a different and a better way to the centralising tendencies of top-down control.

What Next?

There are many governance models for our fisheries that may materialise post-Brexit. There is nothing to say that one or other of the possibilities would not be some form of top-down control. Like any system of governance, when the pieces are thrown in the air they can so easily land with all the power greedily held at the centre or result with powerful lobbies dictating the terms. We will, of course, be working to see that whatever model it is, it is inclusive of the industry. I'll close with a prediction. Fisheries will continue along the path to recovery and at some point the doom-mongers' currency about our industry, like the boy who cried wolf, will be worthless. Those eNGOs that stick to it will either wither or go onto something else. The surviving ones still working in fisheries will be the ones that are actually supporting industry to sustainably manage its own affairs and celebrating what is possible. Bring on the optimists.

Full story courtesy of the NFFO website.

Live video from the @FishingforLeave Flotilla

Follow the fleet as the FishingforLeave flotilla leaves the harbour in Newlyn around 6pm and sails to Mousehole and then across Mount's Bay to St Michael's Mount then returns close along the shore from Marazion, past Long Rock to Penzance harbour before steaming back to Newlyn.

#fishingforleave Tweets

Latest #fishingnews - Fish landing obligation approved by EU

Today the Commission adopted a plan to reduce the wasteful practice of discarding – throwing overboard unwanted fish – in the North Sea. This discard plan concerns demersal fisheries, i.e. fish that feed on or near the sea bottom, and is a temporary measure to phase out discarding and gradually put in place the landing obligation, a key component of the EU's reformed Common Fisheries Policy. It follows similar plans for demersal species in the Atlantic earlier this month.

Discarding constitutes a substantial waste of resources that threatens the sustainable exploitation and economic viability of fisheries. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that over 7 million tonnes - 8 % of the total global fish catches - are discarded yearly. The discard plan adopted today determines which demersal fisheries in the North Sea will be subject to the landing obligation, while also setting out certain exemptions. The first group of exemptions, so-called de minimis exemptions, allows discarding a small percentage of catches in fisheries where increasing the selectivity is difficult or where handling costs are disproportionately high. The second, so-called survivability exemption allows discarding species that have a high chance of surviving.

All exemptions have been set taking into account available scientific advice and following discussions with scientific advisory body STECF. Certain exemptions will be reassessed in 2016 taking into account additional supporting information from Member States.

The discard plans will apply from 1 January 2016 for one year, once final adoption takes place. Other discard plans will have to be adopted for 2017 to bring additional fisheries under the landing obligation.

Background:

Background to what is meant by discards and the forthcoming Landing Obligation.

The reformed CFP aims to make EU fisheries more sustainable. Between 2015 and 2019, EU fishermen will therefore gradually be required to land all fish they catch.

The CFP entails several provisions to facilitate the implementation of the landing obligation. They include specific flexibility mechanisms that should be implemented through comprehensive multiannual plans, or, in the absence of multiannual plans, through so-called discard plans. Discard plans are envisaged as a temporary measure with a maximum duration of three years. They are developed as joint recommendations agreed by Member States from the same region or sea basin, in this case Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.

Today's discard plan is not the first to be adopted: in October 2014 the Commission adopted discard plans for pelagic and industrial fisheries in all EU waters and for fisheries for cod in the Baltic. These plans have been applied since 1 January 2015. On 12 October 2015 two discard plans for demersal species in the Atlantic followed. 


More information:

Discard plan for certain demersal fisheries in the North Sea and in Union waters of ICES Division IIa

Annex

Comment on; Update - So how’s that “catch shares” revolution working out for groundfish?

Here's another excellent article from Nils Stope from the other side of the Atlantic - where, as regular readers will know - State interference (for want of a better term) in the USA's groundfish fishing industry often mirrors our own whitefish and demersal scene in the North Sea and beyond and as such we can profit and learn form their experience as they are ahead of us in some ways. It's not a great story either - huge and inflexible plans brought in to manage fisheries every bit as diverse and varied in terms of socioeconomic diversity as in the UK have led to, well not much really - and one sobering thought that has only recently occurred to me - they have it easy! How come? Well for starters the fish are subject to a single nation fishing for them - The US of A - whereas the waters around the UK are fished not by just the UK but shared with all the EU member countries entitled to fish in these waters too - complicated? - you bet Nils!

Read on:

Alternating with original FishNet USA articles I will be going back to pieces I’ve written (for FishNet and other outlets) over the past 19 years – isn’t it amazing how fast time goes when you’re having fun? - to see how accurate I was in identifying industry trends and predicting what their impacts were going to be. Rather than redistributing the original articles I’ll link to them on the web and try to keep these updates to two pages or under. The original for this update from March, 2014 is at http://www.aifrb.org/fishosophy/____________________
Most of you probably remember when newly appointed NOAA head Jane Lubchenco went to New England and announced that she was going to save our nation’s oldest fishery. But if it didn’t make a lasting impact on you, quoting from the Environmental Defense blog, EDFish by Tesia Love on April 8, 2009, “Sally McGee, Emilie Litsinger and I got to witness something pretty wonderful today.  Jane Lubchenco came to the New England Fishery Management Council meeting to announce the immediate release of $16 million to the groundfish fishery to help move the fishery to ‘sector” catch share management by providing funding for cooperative research to help fishermen get through a tough fishing year with very strict limits on fishing effort.”  She went on to quote Dr. Lubchenco “we need a rapid transition to sectors and catch shares. Catch shares are a powerful tool to getting to sustainable fisheries and profitability.  I challenge you to deliver on this in Amendment 16, to include measures to end overfishing.  I will commit the resources to my staff to do their part to ensure Amendment 16 is passed in June. We are shining a light on your efforts and we will track your progress.  There is too much at stake to allow delay and self-interest to prevent sectors and ultimately catch shares from being implemented.”
I’m sure that you were there with the rest of us, heaving a huge sigh of relief with visions of Dr. Lubchenco on her shiny steed,  first riding to the rescue of the New England fishery, and then on to all of the rest of our struggling fisheries. “Hyo Silver! Away!”
So how did she do? A couple of years back NOAA/NMFS released the 2012 Final Report on the Performance of the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery (May 2012 – April 2013). It’s available athttp://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1401/. The report included a table - available at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/publications/crd/crd1401/tables.pdf - included a table titled Summary of major trends (May through April, includes all vessels with a valid limited access multispecies permit) for the fishing years 2009 to 2012. The table only takes up a single page, is pretty easily understood and is well worth your consideration in its entirety but I’ll take the liberty of synopsizing what I think are the major points it illustrates. In each of the four years the groundfish revenues, landed weight, number of active vessels that took a groundfish trip, the total number of groundfish trips, and the total crew days on groundfish trips decreased. The non-groundfish revenues and landed weight increased. The days absent on a non-groundfish trip increased slightly then decreased.
And then we come to 2013 (it seems that according to NOAA/NMFS, 2014 hasn’t gotten here yet). Had the myriad benefits of Dr. Lubchenco’s and her ENGO/foundation cronies’ Catch Share Revolution finally arrived? Apparently, not quite yet. According to the 2013 Final Report on the Performance of the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery (May 2013 – April 2014), just about everything that was falling in FY 2009 to 2012 continued to fall in FY 2014. I won’t go over any of the details, but the corresponding Table 1 for that year is available at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/read/socialsci/pdf/groundfish_report_fy2013.pdf.
Oh well, I guess she deserves a few points for trying – and we shouldn’t forget that before she could really focus on fixing groundfish she was distracted by having to dump a couple of millions of gallons of Corexit into the Gulf of Mexico.
Thirteen species are included in the New England Fishery Management Council’s multi-species fishery management plan, the “groundfish” FMP. Four of those species support no or minimal directed fisheries. The landings of those that support a significant commercial fishery are in the table below (from the NOAA/NMFS commercial landings database). Looking at these data, it’s impossible to suggest that after years of intensive management this management regime is anything that could be considered a success – unless your idea of success is putting a whole bunch of people out of work. In fact only the most charitable among us could term it anything other than disaster – and it’s a disaster that has been in the making since long before Dr. Lubchenco so fatuously announced that she was going to fix it.
(I’ll add here that catch share management is not a cure-all for all that’s wrong with fishery management nor is it the reason for management failures – though at the time Dr. Lubchenco and her “team” apparently believed it was. It is nothing more than an option for dividing the catch among users. As such it can have profound socioeconomic impacts on participants in the fishery and on fishing communities that depend on it, but not on the fishery resources themselves.)  

Species	Year	Metric Tons	Value	Species	Year	Metric Tons	Value
Atlantic	2009	8946	$25,223,364	Haddock	2009	5,818	$13,655,842
Cod	2010	8039	$28,142,681		2010	9,811	$21,715,488
	2011	7981	$32,596,942		2011	5,709	$16,316,219
	2012	4766	$22,200,043		2012	1,959	$7,833,001
	2013	2261	$10,455,352		2013	1,869	$6,002,480
Plaice	2009	1395	$3,886,809		2009	1,696	$3,556,719
	2010	1413	$4,498,591	Hake	2010	1,807	$4,116,221
	2011	1387	$4,274,757		2011	2,907	$5,849,790
	2012	1480	$5,048,688		2012	2,772	$6,933,743
	2013	1318	$4,688,995		2013	2,238	$6,484,444
Winter	2009	2209	$8,094,381	Pollock	2009	7,492	$10,010,039
Flounder	2010	1587	$6,959,547		2010	5,158	$9,529,022
	2011	2124	$8,002,376		2011	7,193	$12,292,573
	2012	2395	$10,331,500		2012	6,743	$13,185,509
	2013	2746	$9,899,924		2013	5,058	$11,395,943
Yellowtail	2009	1605	$4,759,536	Acadian	2009	1,440	$1,572,292
Flounder	2010	1318	$4,193,981	Redfish	2010	1,646	$1,959,681
	2011	1827	$4,762,969		2011	2,014	$2,754,692
	2012	1808	$5,396,502		2012	4,035	$5,891,429
	2013	1278	$4,199,927		2013	3,577	$4,337,163
Witch	2009	949	$4,036,115
Flounder	2010	759	$3,773,526
	2011	870	$3,955,053
	2012	1037	$4,247,528
	2013	686	$3,735,330

How might it be fixed? In the original FishNet article I quoted a couple of paragraphs from a National Academy of Sciences study Evaluating the Effectiveness of Fish Stock Rebuilding Plans in the United States (available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18488/evaluating-the-effectiveness-of-fish-stock-rebuilding-plans-in-the-united-states). 
I can’t think of anything more valuable than repeating those words here. On page 178 of the report the authors concluded “the tradeoff between flexibility and prescriptiveness within the current legal framework and MFSCMA (Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act) guidelines for rebuilding underlies many of the issues discussed in this chapter. The present approach may not be flexible or adaptive enough in the face of complex ecosystem and fishery dynamics when data and knowledge are limiting. The high degree of prescriptiveness (and concomitant low flexibility) may create incompatibilities between single species rebuilding plans and EBFM (Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management). Fixed rules for rebuilding times can result in inefficiencies and discontinuities of harvest-control rules, put unrealistic demands on models and data for stock assessment and forecasting, cause reduction in yield, especially in mixed-stock situations, and de-emphasize socio-economic factors in the formulation of rebuilding plans. The current approach specifies success of individual rebuilding plans in biological terms. It does not address evaluation of the success in socio-economic terms and at broader regional and national scales, and also does not ensure effective flow of information (communication) across regions.”

In other words, the fishery managers need more informed flexibility to adequately manage our fisheries. It has been the goal of the fishing industry’s friends in Congress to provide this necessary flexibility (with adequate safeguards, of course). Conversely it has been the goal of a handful of foundations and the ENGOs they support and a smaller handful of so-called fishermen’s organizations to prevent this, and it seems that they have been willing to resort to just about any tactics to do it. As they have been successful in their efforts the fishing industry has continued to lose infrastructure that will never be replaced and markets that will be next to impossible to recover – and the percentage of imported seafood that we consume will continue to increase in spite of the fact that our fisheries are among the richest in the world.

Nils has an excellent website that can be viewed here: