Saturday 2 March 2013
Friday 1 March 2013
Let's hear it for the fishermen!!!!!!
This is where NGOs - funded by the likes of Oak and Pew can get it so wrong - the kind of missionary zeal that gave us the legacy of so many disaffected third world communities to day following a good dose of British and others' imperialism!
Fisherfolk: Conservation Refugees Reloaded
Fourteen Million indigenous people have been displaced on land by conservation activities. Indigenous peoples have lived on their lands for generations and their behaviour has generally been determined by norms rather than written laws and what they have to do to survive. Protected area managers are supported (generally) by western NGOs whos behaviour is determined by economics, written laws, idealism and superficial science. Often poverty is used as a lever to “improve” the lives of primitive peoples. Brockington points out:
“One problem facing antipoverty advocates is the way that poverty is quantified. Personal income is the benchmark. It seems impossible for economists to understand that people living in the complete absence of money can be far wealthier that their neighbours in close proximity who love at the edge of the local (and global) economy. Indigenous people earning zero dollars a day, but with balanced protein-rich diets, clean water, protection from the elements, traditional medicines and strong cultures should not be placed beneath or even on a par with people earning a few dollars a week from menial labour but who have short lifespans, bad health, undernourishment, no medicines and a brutish culture”
Indigenous peoples are generally regarded with distaste in their homelands. Consider for example how the average UK citizen views gypsies, how Indonesians view the Bajo, the mistreatment of the Inuit in North America and the shoddy treatment of Aboriginies by Australians. Much of this is likely to do with the chasm that there is between the way in which goods are valued. Indigenous peoples, often living in small groups, survive on reciprocity and social responsibility, a value system often oiled by their close family ties.
Conservationsists love the word SCIENCE. Brockington and Igoe point out that generally organisations claim this word when they are striving to acquire power and prestige and to suppress opposition. The public find it hard to question “scientific facts” and a variety of techniques are employed by conservation organisations – selective choice of facts to use, using irrelevant but impressive sounding facts and ignoring inconvenient truths.
Fishermen are a bit like indigenous folk. They live, quite literally, at the margins of society, they work irregular hours, have their own social codes, can occasionally be viewed as uncouth, do something most people don’t understand and they are viewed by many as taking something for nothing from a public resource. Most conservation organisations appear to find it convenient to ignore the fact that fisherfolk have been working the sea for hundreds or thousands of years (without adding tonnes of pesticide, fertilizer or resorting to GM crops). In passing you might like to watch a world renowned fisheries scientist (Ray Hilborn) comparing the ecological impacts of fishing v farming. The differences between them and a landowner are:
1) they don’t have a piece of paper that says they own anything,
2) their ancestors didn’t steal land from peasants by force,
3) they are not over-represented in the house of lords,
4) you can’t do a mickey mouse degree at Oxford or Cambridge in “Marine management” because your parents come from the right social class
5) when you retire you leave with a broken body and a boat that is worth less than when you started.
2) their ancestors didn’t steal land from peasants by force,
3) they are not over-represented in the house of lords,
4) you can’t do a mickey mouse degree at Oxford or Cambridge in “Marine management” because your parents come from the right social class
5) when you retire you leave with a broken body and a boat that is worth less than when you started.
Fishing has been perhaps one on the last occupations where you can succeed purely by dint of hard work and tenacity.
Recently we have seen the high profile application of pseudo-science to the world of fisheries by a cook. Would you ask a fisherman how to chop vegetables? Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is making enormous amounts of money out of his public haranguing of the fishing industry (Fishfight isn’t a charity by the way). With his initial campaign against discards I just felt a mild irritation that someone who chops vegetables and heats meat was able to get further than many many marine scientists who have wrestled with the problem of discards for years. More recently however he has jumped on the Marine “Conservation” Zone bandwagon. Something that rich propaganda organisations such as Conservation International and Greenpeace are only too happy to support. I recommend listening to Ray Hilborn for a bit of balance in the face of this well financed barrage of mis-information.
The fact that there is virtually no evidence to support the idea that MCZs work in temperate areas, especially over soft sediments, seems to have been completely ignored. The government and most sensible people agree that there is a complete vacuum of evidenceto support the establishment of many of the proposed MCZs and some work that suggests their dominance as a paradigm in marine conservation ecology is a function of ideologyrather than hard science. Simple folk like to believe that if you leave things alone things will get better and the world will return to some halcyon state – the “Erroneous equilibrium paradigm”. Real and positive conservation/resource management requires us to look more broadly than single species or drawing lines on charts. As Ostrom said, complex situation require complex solutions – there is no single solution, no magic bullet. As Beth Fulton said at the last World Fisheries Congress, “We need to tread lightly and with a broad footstep”
Excluding fisherfolk from areas that they have fished for generations in order to salve the consciences of middle class, sandle-shod, cord-wearing intellectual hippies is not the answer. Look at the chart here (provided by Mike Cohen of Holderness Fishing Industry Group) and look at how much area could be off limits to fishermen. This area will be fished harder and unsustainably as the fishing industry is more and more squeezed. There is no evidence of any sort of spillover effect likely to occur in this region. Note how MCZs work around the requirements of the Energy Industry (new kids on the block) but not the unfashionable fish folk. Fisherfolk are likely to be the new conservation refugees and if the extremists get their way there will be further marginalisation, job losses and poverty in rural coastal towns and villages in the UK. The pretty ones will be sources of 2nd homes to the middle classes escaping from the city – packed in summer, tumbleweed and closed shops in the winter. The ugly ones will be left to rot.
Proposed and current fishery exclusion zones off the yorkshire coast
Although my ancestors were fishermen and whalers, I am not blindly pro-fishing and I am not anti-conservationist. I’m just anti-stupidity.
A big thank you to this storey from Dr Magnus Johnson who is a Marine Biologist at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences. His views are his own.
Fine weather for the Scottish prawners!
 |
| Prawn trawler, Mia Jane W, formely the Nicoals Jeremy built in Concarneu France by Chantier Pirou. |
There's some fine weather in Scottish waters for the prawn boys today!
Good haddock fishing in the North Sea
A skipper Jimmy put it, " A bonny haul of haddocks, no discards there!"
Video shot three days ago aboard the Scottish white fish trawler, Ocean Venture.
The boat landed to Peterhead market this morning where, according to skipper John Buchan, " the price for haddock was about 30 to 40 per cent less than this time last year, bigger sized haddocks are nearly 1/2 what they were then, cod wee bit better today but still not expensive".
This was the landing sheet for a very busy Peterhead fish market this morning:
The boat landed to Peterhead market this morning where, according to skipper John Buchan, " the price for haddock was about 30 to 40 per cent less than this time last year, bigger sized haddocks are nearly 1/2 what they were then, cod wee bit better today but still not expensive".
This was the landing sheet for a very busy Peterhead fish market this morning:
The Truth, a Good Story, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight
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:
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:
A fairly fishy Friday!
Magnifique monk!...
louster of a ling...
humungus hake...
pristine pollack...
c'mon the blues...
out of the water for the first time since being launched last year, the crabber, Emma Louise...
still in port two tugs on passage...
the survey vessel Chartwell lays outside the new beam trawler Sapphire II almost set for her maiden Newlyn voyage - Easter's coming Mike!...
with the demise of all but one of the old wooden MFV sidewinder's its got to be crew - must be close though!!....
skipper Alan Dwan on the Ajax considers the situation...
classic Volvo rally car!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)