There is an excellent article in today’s Times newspaper highlighting the anger among fishermen outraged by claims in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight programme.
The article says that trawlermen from all around the British coast are joining a Facebook campaign called the Real Fish Fight to protest about what they claim was misinformation in the three programmes.
The article continues: In Peterhead, one of the last whitefish ports in Britain, campaigners have set up shop by the harbourside market to protest against his campaign. At the weekend, trade in cod and haddock was brisk, the catch brought into port by a fishing fleet that has fallen from 120 vessels in the 1990s to only 30.
As the fleet has been cut, the fishermen claim that cod stocks in the North Atlantic have reached their highest levels for almost 20 years, and ships such as the Budding Rose, skippered by Peter Bruce, require only a relatively short time at sea to fill their holds.
“We’re not happy with the way that we have been portrayed,” said Mr Bruce. “What the programme called facts were just lies. We thought there was such a misrepresentation of the situation, we had to set up on our own.”
Against the TV chef’s campaign, the trawlermen’s effort appear to be a drop in the ocean. Fearnley-Whittingstall Fish Fight Facebook page has 252,000 likes against under 4,500 achieved by the Real Fish Fight.
The trawlermen, though, are fighting back on the TV’s chef website. One contributor, Johnny Seago, wrote: “Hugh is only in this to raise his own profile and bank balance at the expense of the fishing fleet. Where I fish, we have had a trawling ban for over 40 years. We have sustainably fished for over 200 years.”
Another contributor wrote: “In the 1908s there were over 1,000 large trawlers able to fish 365 days a year. Today there are less than 100 and restricted to a limited number of fishing days. You will not see trawlers fishing close to the shore as shown on Fish Fight.”
Mr Bruce said that colleagues were outraged that fishermen’s efforts to help nurture fish stocks had gone unremarked by the TV series. “We’ve been working with green groups, WWF, Marine Scotland and fisheries scientists. We innovated, changed the mesh size on nets; some of the areas closed to fishing were chosen on the advice of fishermen themselves.”
Commenting on today’s article in The Times, Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the SFF, said it underlined the huge anger on the quayside about the failure of Hugh’s Fish Fight to recognise the considerable efforts made by fishermen to conserve stocks.
According to Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics, the amount of fishing effort by the Scottish fleet has declined by a massive 70% between 2000 and 2011. Furthermore, the latest scientific figures from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) reveals that the spawning stock biomass of North Sea cod has increased by 250% from 2006 to 2012. Fishing mortality for cod (or the amount of fish being taken out of the sea) has declined by 43% between 2000 and 2011.
Bertie Armstrong, said: “It should not be forgotten that fishermen have made huge sacrifices over the last 10 years or so to reach this stage. The number of fishing vessels has dramatically declined and there have been strict effort controls as well. In addition, we have developed our own measures such as technical alterations to nets to significantly reduce discards and implementing real-time area closures to protect juvenile and spawning fish.
“In essence, our fishermen are by regulation taking much longer to catch much less fish, which has been achieved against a background of high operating costs.
“The Fish Fight programme and subsequent online blogs and articles have also given the impression that fishermen are against Marine Protected Areas. The ironic thing is that we actually support the principle of MPAs – it is just the process of their implementation must not be rushed and pre-judged. Their needs to be careful scientific scrutiny to ensure that each proposed area is deserving of MPA status and is not designated on the basis of spurious evidence.
“It is a complex and difficult process, and a whole number of factors need to be taken into account, including the possibility of displacing fishing effort into other areas and the socio-economic impact on fragile fishing communities. It would be sheer madness to implement MPAs on the back of a sensationalist TV campaign. It is also entirely possible to meet the intertwined aims of marine protection and sustainable food production by dealing in fact rather than emotion.”