The first week of the annual fisheries negotiations between the UK and our neighbours is over and it is clear that there is still a long way to go before the various deals are concluded that will determine the prospects of our industry for the coming year. The crucial issue is, of course, determining the level of exploitation that each stock can support. It’s a simple enough concept, but the decision is seldom straightforward.
It is a key principle of modern fisheries management that scientific evidence should underpin the decision-making process. In the context of these negotiations, this means the annual ICES fisheries advice. People who either do not understand the process, or else are willfully disingenuous in their depiction of it, present ICES advice as though it were commandments inscribed on tablets of stone. The word of God: omniscient; infallible; any variation from it, an act of gross immorality.
It is nothing of the sort, of course. There is a healthy academic literature around the misuse and misinterpretation of ICES advice and it would be a refreshing (if entirely fanciful) prospect, were some of the commentators who so uncritically parrot attack lines from the anti-seafood lobby to inform themselves better by reading some of these more objective sources.
ICES does not set out to dictate fisheries management outcomes. It publishes advice: information given to assist others to take decisions. It is not simply an objective statement of definitive facts about the size and composition of each stock. The available data is nowhere near comprehensive enough for that. Instead, ICES advice incorporates assumptions, conjecture, and subjective judgments alongside hard evidence. Nor does it give a single definitive statement for each species. People who seek a scientific-looking figleaf to disguise their antipathy towards others eating fish, may fixate on the ‘headline’ advice, but this is simply one catching scenario among several that ICES evaluates for each stock. It is generally the scenario that a mathematical model suggests will bring the stock to maximum sustainable yield level in the shortest possible time. This isn’t the only way to manage a fishery, however. It is perfectly legitimate to work over a longer period: to accept that a management plan will not achieve perfection immediately, but will instead reach the same endpoint over a more realistic timescale.
And really, why not do that? Why not allow food production to continue, jobs to be sustained, and coastal communities to remain economically secure, at the expense of waiting a year or two longer for an estimated number of fish to reach a point that a computer simulation suggests might be good? We have established the whole apparatus of ICES and set it to work examining multiple different management scenarios. Insisting that we should only ever follow the headline advice is like getting multiple quotes for every purchase but only ever choosing the dearest one. Such an approach is overly simplistic and will in many cases fail to achieve the objectives of good fisheries management.
We need to remember that the purpose of fisheries management is not conservation: it is the production of food in a way that can be sustained indefinitely. The Fisheries Act 2020 and the Joint Fisheries Statement both recognise that this requires social and economic considerations to be incorporated into management decisions, as well as environmental factors. I would argue that, where a region has seen TAC cuts for several years in a row, preventing fishing businesses from becoming unviable must be a central consideration in this. Further cuts should be avoided, or at the very least minimised, unless absolutely essential for the survival of particular stocks. More moderate advice from ICES should be preferred to the inflexible and limited headline statement. The objective of bringing about national benefit includes retaining jobs and producing food, not just prioritising ecological goals on unnecessarily strict timescales.
We have become accustomed to NGO commentators demanding to know how the environment in the abstract has been taken into account when TACs are set – increasingly accompanied by threats of legal action if they don’t like the outcomes. The only thing that this approach sustains is controversy. It would make a truly refreshing change if they showed the same interest was in understanding how evidence of social and economic needs were incorporated into the agreements.
It shouldn’t be that government only focuses those parts of the Fisheries Act and the JFS that the wealthy threaten to sue them about, but it is hard to argue that this has not been the case in recent years. There is a new government in office for these annual negotiations, however. We are watching see if it will be business as usual, or whether they care enough about our industry and our communities to do things better.
Full story courtesy of the NFFO.