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The NFFO - the body that represent the interests of fishermen via the various groups and organisations that represent fishermen across the UK - has responded to last week's FishFight campaign and the ensuing media attention and reaction gleaned from other parties. It rightly points out that very little was made of the current initiatives to reduce discards - for instance, the discards programme could have highlighted the work of CEFAS and the Brixham beamers that took part in their Project 50 programme. As it is, time will tell if last week marks a turning point in the history of the industry as it seeks to ensure its own future along with that of the very fish it seeks to catch.

In the run-up to Channel 4's FishFight week, the NFFO published this cautionary tale - citing mis-reporting by the respected critic AA Gill as the perfect example of just how wrong the media can get things despite their best intentions - if a simple solution to discards and quotas was forthcoming it would have surfaced many years ago and have been adopted by nations around the globe. In the meantime, first read what the NFFO felt about the coming week and then their response in the wake:

The Mixed Blessings of Celebrity – The Fight for Fish

The fishing industry is still weighing up whether this attention is something to be welcomed and embraced, or something to be feared. The answer is likely to be, like celebrity itself, a mixed blessing.
Certainly, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign on discards has so far turned a useful spotlight on the scale of discarding generated by the requirements of the Common Fisheries Policy. It has highlighted the gulf between the Commission’s hand-wringing over discards and its practical policies which make large-scale discarding a legal obligation for vessels in mixed fisheries. It also has drawn attention to the hugely encouraging progress that can be made in reducing other types of discards when the right approach is taken – in for example the 50% project.

http://www.nffo.org.uk/news/commision_discards.html

On the other hand, the fishing industry has good reason to fear the arrival of instant experts, with their preconceptions, over-generalisations, need for drama and instant solutions. http://www.nffo.org.uk/news/starter_kit.html
The Federation recently helped the star Times and Sunday Times food writer A.A. Gill find a berth aboard a North Sea trawler, in the hope that he would then be able to write in a fair and objective way about the realities of fishing today. Like most people he was horrified by the sheer waste involved in the discards required by the vessel to stay on the right side of the law. But when it came to solutions A.A. had the answer – follow the Norwegians, they have replaced quotas by a days-at -sea regime. In fact the Norwegians do not have a days-at-sea regime and would pour scorn on anyone who suggested that they should. Getting it this wrong, when it comes to instant prescriptive solutions for the fishing industry, takes style and panache and a deep lack of respect. A phone call could have checked that particular fact. But that call was never made.

This is the fear that the industry has as we go into Channel 4’s Fight for Fish week. In the public mind the UK fishing industry is likely to be tainted by association with unsupportable practices elsewhere in the world; and instant A. A. type non-solutions will be promoted because they are easy to explain in a 3 minute clip to camera.

The new recipes using underutilised species, created and demonstrated by some of the biggest celebrities of our time are a brilliant idea and could do a lot of good in expanding the British palate (as well as saving consumers money). But even there the pre-broadcast blurb suggests that the reason that consumers might want to use coley as an alternative, is because cod and haddock are not being fished sustainably. Haddock for goodness sake! Why? ICES advice is that North Sea haddock is at or around maximum sustainable yield. And whilst it is true that some cod stocks in EU waters face severe problems, those fisheries have only ever provided a tiny fraction of the cod consumed in the UK. What is the point of scaring consumers? The big cod fisheries are at Iceland and at North Norway and have been for centuries, and there is no suggestion that those fisheries are in any kind of trouble – quite the contrary.

So, tighten your seat belts. We are in for a rocky ride. This degree of media attention can open doors, increase understanding and promote good causes. It can also generate misconceptions and corner politicians into knee-jerk reactions. A mixed blessing indeed.

The here is the NFFO's response a week of intensive TV fishing - reproduced here in full:

"A Turning Point in European Fisheries?

Will Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s Fight for Fish campaign mark a turning point in the Common Fisheries Policy? Or will the celebrity chef now move on to turn the spotlight on some other aspect of food production, leaving us pretty much where we are? In particular, what will the campaign, backed by last week’s major Channel 4 focus on fish and fishing, achieve in terms of reducing discards?

There is no doubting the man’s energy, commitment and astute approach to publicity. But the answers to those questions are not at all clear. Having marched us up to the altar of eliminating discards, where do we go from here?

Of all people, the Guardian’s TV critic hit the nail on the head. The Fight for Fish brilliantly illuminated the problem but offered precious few – in fact no – concrete solutions.

Perhaps that is fair enough. Perhaps Hugh recognises the limits to his many competences and having highlighted the irrationality and obscenity of discarding mature cod and other valuable species in a hungry world, leaves it to others to develop the solutions.

What the week of TV programmes didn’t do was give any attention to the initiatives already in place that are already successfully reducing discards. None of these represents a panacea – there are none - but they do indicate practical, tailored, solutions to particular types of discards in specific fisheries. Perhaps they weren’t mentioned because they are rather technical and not easily explained on camera. Nothing was said of:

•Real Time Closures and other types of cod avoidance
•The Catch Quota initiative which eliminates cod discards completely for participating vessels
•The 50% project in the South West
•The success of gear selectivity measures in reducing discards of juveniles, not least the use of square mesh panels in the haddock and whiting fisheries
•The many voluntary changes to fishing patterns applied by individual skippers to avoid cod and discards as far as possible.

The programme’s main attention and indignation focused on the dumping of mature fish discarded because of the rigidities of the Common Fisheries Policy. This is probably where the Fight for Fish Campaign will have its greatest impact, not least because it is well timed to coincide with the 2011 review of the EU Cod Management Plan, the main culprit in the cod discard story.

Cod Discards

At the outset of the current Cod Management Plan, in the autumn of 2008, the College of EU Commissioners made a fateful decision which led directly to the economic, ethical and ecological disaster filmed by Hugh and his team. Faced with ICES science that pointed to a rapidly rebuilding cod stock in the North Sea, the College of Commissioners looked at the various catch options suggested by the scientists and deliberately chose one that would lead to the scale of discarding, now witnessed in graphic detail by the viewing public. The reason for this choice was that the Commissioners didn’t believe that, having recently pronounced the cod stocks near to collapse, they could sanction the large increases in the quota suggested by ICES because the general public would not understand such an apparent turnaround. The Commission may now rue that decision, as it faces criticism for the massive level of discards of mature cod seen over the last few years - and as public revulsion over the resulting discards has built.

The Commission’s cynical decision was taken to follow the most restrictive catch options in the belief that the resulting discards, out at sea and out of sight of the general public, would be easier to explain than a dramatic increase in the quota for cod.

The Fight for Fish campaign, if nothing else, has blown the lid off that particular blunder but that decision and its consequences will be revisited during the course of this year as the Cod Management Plan is reviewed: This why the Fight for Fish campaign despite its roots in our transient celebrity culture may turn out to be pivotal.

Solutions and Non-solutions

There is no single solution to discards and that is because there are different reasons why discarding takes place in different fisheries. It is fair to say however that the various rigidities of the Common Fisheries Policy, low value underutilised species and unselective gear are the main drivers. There are however many potential solutions. There are multiple initiatives, some under way, some of them mentioned above, which can significantly reduce the scale of discards.

•Reforming the EU Cod Management Plan would reduce discards of mature cod at a stroke; the development of various types of avoidance strategy is well under way and can go much further;

•Marketing initiatives to change public tastes towards delicious but underutilised species all have their role to play.

•The means to more selective fishing in many cases already exist or can be found quite rapidly by skippers where the right kind of encouragement and incentives put in place. The NFFO has made suggestions on how this might be achieved through the means of sustainable fishing plans http://www.nffo.org.uk/news/response_to_cfp.html

Blind Alleys

It is important to knock a few blind alleys on the head.

Some commentators have reverted to saloon bar logic: “just ban” discards. It is important however to understand that where a theoretical discard ban is in place, such as in Norway, it is the cherry on top of an entirely different approach to fisheries management – one that is adapted to the specifics of their fisheries. In Norway’s case the primary emphasis is on protection of juveniles, principally through a massive programme real time closures. This certainly works well to reduce discards, although even here there should be no illusion that discards have been entirely eliminated. But is difficult to see how a ban and the underpinning programme of large-scale RTCs could be workable in the much more complex and diverse mixed fisheries of the EU. Giving in to demands for a theoretical ban on discards would amount to posturing and would achieve roughly zero. We have already tasted this kind of knee-jerk non-solution with the 2008 ban on high-grading, as meaningless a piece of poorly thought-through reactive legislation as you are likely to find.

Quotas are here to stay. The reason for this is that in fisheries where stocks are shared it is necessary to distribute the fisheries resource to the different member states, to Third Countries that have access arrangements with the EU, and to different groups of fishermen and vessel operators. Despite the rigidities of the present system and of operating a quota system in mixed fisheries, no one has yet been able to suggest a more effective allocation mechanism that would deal with the realities of shared stocks. The plain fact is that we have little option but to work to make the quota system function better than it does at present as opposed to ditching it. And there is much that can be done on this front. Catch quotas are one example. More efficient quota swaps and transfer arrangements are another.
Replacing quotas with effort (days-at-sea) allocations, despite its superficial attractions to some, is a non-starter. Experience as well as academic economic theory confirms that effort limitation creates a perverse incentive which intensifies fishing activity during the period that the vessel is permitted to go to sea. One form of this is seen in technological innovation – what the Americans call capital stuffing. It is therefore an approach entirely counter-productive in conservation terms. Besides it lacks the precision of the quota system as an allocation mechanism.

Spotlight

So how has the fishing industry fared under this week’s media spotlight? Apart from the focus on discards, Arthur Potts Dawson’s trip as a deckie-learner aboard the Cornishman, a Newlyn beamer, usefully highlighted the tough working environment faced by fishermen in bringing fish to the consumers’ table. The celebrity chef boarded the vessel with the usual urban sensitivities and left the vessel with a deep respect for the skipper and crew, who would be turning around to return to sea whilst Arthur returned to his London restaurant. The highpoint was Arthur’s extreme anxieties aboard during a force 9 gale - that turned out to be force 4 - with the force 9 still to come. The crew came across as calm professionals doing a very hard job.

Time will tell. The programmes, for the most part, avoided the worst type of lazy media stereotypes; and the encouragement to try different types of fish must be considered wholly positive, even if the choices and underlying rationales were a bit wonky. Fish farming got a bashing, largely for its scale and its reliance on industrial fishing for feed species.

As we have suggested above, the main legacy of the Fight for Fish could be in its impact on the review of the EU Cod Management Plan and we should know the result of that within 12 months."

Supermarkets have not only been swamped by people asking for sustainably caught fish - but they have also been wrong footed by people now asking for more obscure fish like dab or pollack. The big stores are ccomplaining that if they had been forewarned then they might have been able to source a wider variety of fish to counteract the huge response from a well intentioned public!

Who's to say that if Hugh and his team had alerted the big supermarkets and tried to pre-empt the rush for alternative species they would have taken any notice prior to last week's campaign - given the reaction and responses of the biggest suppliers over the incorrect or misleading labelling of tuna products - that they would have been taken seriously?

Undoubtedly, the FishFight campaign has pushed fish into the limelight, well up the discussion boards and twitter trending tables across the UK, hopefully Europe and beyond. The industry needs to capitalise on this - but with clear intentions to preclude any knee-jerk consumer driven demands over the catching and handling of fish.