Friday 28 September 2012

Newlyn Harbour Lights appeal!

THE HARBOUR Lights Committee in Newlyn need to raise almost £3,000 by November 4 to ensure the display goes ahead as planned this year.

The lights, which decorate the port, have been on show for decades and form part of a popular bus tour heading through the village to Mousehole each Christmas.

However, following the cancellation of the annual Newlyn Raft Race fundraiser this summer, due to a lack of volunteers to deal with health and safety requirements, the group is still short of the £5,000 needed to run the annual display.

Nathalie Keogh, from the Harbour Lights Committee, said: "I've lived in Newlyn all my life. It has always been a close-knit community and I would be devastated not to see the lights go up."

A pub quiz is being held at The Swordfish Inn at 7.30pm tonight to raise money.

A meeting is being held at The Centre in Newlyn at 7.30pm on Tuesday, October 2, to discuss more fundraising ideas.

'Ridiculous' that UK will not sign fishing treaty

A treaty trying to reduce the number of deaths in the commercial fishing industry comes into force today, however Britain have not signed it.

Mike Park, chief executive of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, told the Today programme that he expects Britain to have "sound reasons" for not signing the treaty, but he "can't imagine what they are." An estimated 24,000 lives are lost each year in the industry, and Mr Park described having to save lives on his vessel whilst working as a fishing captain, including two-air lift rescues in his career.

Story courtesy off BBC Radio4 Today

Thursday 27 September 2012

Latest UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2011

UK Fisheries Annual statistics

UK Sea Fisheries Statistics and its subsidiary publications The UK Fishing Industry: Structure and Activity and The UK Fishing Industry:

Landings are annual Office for National Statistics publications, adhering to the Code of Practice of Practice for Official Statistics.

UK Sea Fisheries Statistics provides a broad picture of the UK fishing industry and its operations. The coverage includes the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands with separate figures for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The publication includes information on:

the structure and activity of the UK fishing industry
landings
supplies, overseas trade and marketing
main stocks and their level of exploitation
the world fishing industry

UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2011 was published on 27 September 2012.

Agriculture and Fisheries Council (Fisheries) - Press Conference

Council of the European Union - Agriculture and Fisheries

Agriculture and Fisheries Council (Fisheries) - Press Conference

Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 13.00

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Undulatus Asperatus - crowd sourced cloud

Astrolatus Undulatus hanging over Newlyn Harbour

Newlyn played host to a seldom seen cloud formation recently and as a result is helping to get the cloud and its name formally recognised. First identified in 1952 it was not until the internet was used in 2009 to help further the naming cause when Undulatus Asperatus came to the attention of the British based, Cloud Appreciation Society who are currently in the process of getting the cloud officially recognised. The final say is up to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. The undulatus will only be officially recognized if it is included in the WMO’s International Cloud Atlas.

The story was covered by the media including the Daily telegraph yesterday:

"Meteorologists believe they have discovered a new classification of cloud after the unique formation has been spotted in skies around the world.

Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to have the new cloud type, which has been named "Asperatus" after the Latin word for rough, officially added to the international nomenclature scheme used by forecasters to identify clouds. If successful, it will be the first variety of cloud to be classified since 1953.

The new type of cloud forms a dark, lumpy blanket across the sky and has been sighted in locations all over the world, including above the hills of the Scottish Highlands and above Snowdonia, Wales. "It is a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below," said Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, who first identified the asperatus cloud from photographs that were being sent in by members of the society."

As a finalist in the Nikon inFrame photographic competition, the print of the Undulatus Asperatus photo above is currently on display at the Getty Images Gallery in London until October the 6th.

Monday 24 September 2012

Super-trawlers are feeding on EU fishing subsidies

This Op-Ed first appeared in The Australian 24 Sept 2012

In banning supertrawlers from our waters for two years, the Australian Government has sent a strong message to the bloated and subsidised European fishing industry. Fishing in Europe is governed by the EU’s law on fishing, known as the Common Fisheries Policy. It has been a thirty year debacle of failed intervention by Brussels. The noble theory behind the CFP was to manage Europe’s fisheries in a fair and profitable way. But the reality has been a fiasco.

In one official paper, the EU described the CFP as “characterised by overfishing, fleet overcapacity, heavy subsidies, low economic resilience and a decline in the volume of fish caught by European fishermen”. The proof of the CFP’s dismal failure is in the water. According to the EU’s own grim scientific estimates, three quarters of the continent’s fish stocks are overfished.

The principal cause of Europe’s collapsing fish stocks is overcapacity. The EU fleet is simply too big. According to the European Commission, the EU fleet catches two to three times more fish than is sustainable within the continent’s waters. The problem then gets exported, with EU boats ending up in the waters of some of the poorest countries in the world, sending local fish stocks downhill.

Perversely, underpinning the overcapacity are massive EU subsidies, totalling well over one billion euros per year. In 2011, the EU Court of Financial Auditors produced a damning report, which noted that the multi-billion euro European Fisheries Fund designed to balance fishing activities at sustainable levels was actually doing the reverse. Grotesquely, European taxpayers are effectively paying fishermen to destroy the continent’s natural capital.

The EU state that benefits the most from subsidies is Spain – but the Dutch have also got in on the act. Parlevliet & Van der Plas, the company behind the super trawler at the centre of the recent controversy has been heavily favoured, receiving direct and indirect subsidies of more than €55 million in the last two decades. Subsidies appear critical to the business model of Parlevliet. Without subsidies, the firm may have even lost money in recent years.

According to the European Commission, between 30% and 40% of EU fishing fleet have negative long-term profitability, meaning that their income is not enough to cover all their expenses. The broader industry group to which Parlevliet belongs – the Pelagic Freezer-trawler Association representing some of the EU’s biggest distant water boats – would struggle to be profitable without subsidies.

Not all fisheries subsidies are bad. The WTO’s proposed disciplines on fisheries subsidies, for example, would still allow flexibilities for subsistence-type fishing in territorial waters. Administered appropriately, subsidies can also be an effective instrument in drawing down overcapacity. But at their worst subsidies hide and promote economic inefficiencies, lead to unsustainable fishing and distort politics. In Europe it is no surprise that countries and companies that have most feasted from the subsidies trough are among those that are most tenaciously opposing effective reform of the CFP.

In its 2008 Report, Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, the World Bank found the global marine capture fisheries sector to be an underperforming global asset with the difference between the potential and actual net economic benefits in the order of $50 billion per year. The Bank pointed to bad fisheries subsidies as being a big part of the problem and the EU is among the worst offenders.

The administration of the CFP subsidy system has also been associated with organised crime, undue influence and just plain incompetence. One study highlighted a number of instances where millions of euros were paid for ‘vessel modernisation’ and then more money was given for the same vessels to be scrapped a short time later.

European fishing overcapacity needs to be reduced and it makes economic, environmental and social sense to start with massive boats like the supertrawlers. As the United Nations Environment Programme has said, ‘given the wide difference in the catching power, the job creation potential, and the livelihood implications of large-scale versus small-scale fishing vessels, it appears that a reduction effort focused on large-scale vessels could reduce overcapacity at lower socio-economic costs to society.’

Progressive forces within the EU are currently trying to reform the CFP. The EU fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki has spoken repeatedly of the need for urgent reform as has the UK’s Conservative Fisheries Minister, Richard Benyon. Ranged against the subsidised vested interests, these reformers need all the help they can get.

David Ritter is the Chief Executive Officer of Greenpeace Australia Pacific.

Follow him on Twitter : View his full profile here.

Monday's market

Plenty of fine fish on the market this morning, luscious lemons from the Sapphire...

delicious Dorys from the Elisabeth Veronique...

and some more of those rare adult cod...

a feast of #hake from the netter Sparkling Line and the Govenek of Ladram...

filled the western end of the market...

super squid...

an example of the box problem - not so unique for Newlyn - boxes here from Ireland, France, Holland and Belgium as well as individual boats and markets...