Big boxes for big fish...
somehow this mermaid's purse (the egg of a shark) made it ashore...
a box of blues...
two golden opportunities...
Sparkling Line landing in Newlyn...
it's a mystery...
the Anthony Stevenson in better times...
Friday 28 March 2014
#FishyFriday
Big boxes for big fish...
somehow this mermaid's purse (the egg of a shark) made it ashore...
a box of blues...
two golden opportunities...
Sparkling Line landing in Newlyn...
it's a mystery...
the Anthony Stevenson in better times...
Schools to be told to buy local British products, minister says
Local Cornish MP for Camborne George Eustice tells MPs that schools will from September be told to buy local, in season British products for children's meals.
Let's hope he means fish as well!
Schools could be made to buy local produce and in season British fruit and vegetables under plans being considered by ministers.
George Eustice, the farming minister, said that the Department for Education is working on measures to ensure that schools across the country use British produce in their meals.
Mr Eustice told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs committee that from September, schools will be told by the Government that they should be buying local produce.
He said that Michael Gove’s education department is working on a “school food plan” that will “encourage” the use of fresh, British products in children’s meals.
Britain imports billions of pounds of food every year – nearly a quarter of all food consumed every year – and ministers are keen to encourage more local suppliers.
 |
| No doubt Andrew George (seen here buying fresh fish at Newlyn Fish Festival), local MP for Penzance, St Ives and Newlyn will be the first to see that George Osborne's words are turned into deeds! |
Let's hope he means fish as well!
Schools could be made to buy local produce and in season British fruit and vegetables under plans being considered by ministers.
George Eustice, the farming minister, said that the Department for Education is working on measures to ensure that schools across the country use British produce in their meals.
Mr Eustice told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs committee that from September, schools will be told by the Government that they should be buying local produce.
He said that Michael Gove’s education department is working on a “school food plan” that will “encourage” the use of fresh, British products in children’s meals.
Britain imports billions of pounds of food every year – nearly a quarter of all food consumed every year – and ministers are keen to encourage more local suppliers.
Thursday 27 March 2014
In the Hospital? Thank Healthcare Without Harm for Your Local Seafood
This might be from the other side of the pond but surely these are common issues within health care and sourcing healthy food for those under the care of the NHS?
First, what is Health Care Without Harm? "Together with our partners around the world, Health Care Without Harm shares a vision of a health care sector that does no harm, and instead promotes the health of people and the environment. The mission of Health Care Without Harm is to transform the health care sector worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment."
Summer 2013 Health Alliance Seafood Throwdown
What's fish got to do with it? Fish connects us to ecosystems and communities:
At HCWH, the idea of environmental nutrition focuses on the collective responsibility of supporting community and ecosystem health by paying attention to how food is raised, harvested, processed, transported and purchased. This perspective fosters a healthy, sustainable food system by focusing on strengthening communities, supporting social justice and conserving natural resources through sustainable practices. Buying locally caught fish is an important way to support environmental nutrition. Many New England towns are built around the fishing industry; maintaining the strength of this industry is crucial to preserve fishing communities and enable local fishermen to continue a generations-long tradition. Why are hospitals buying local seafood?
Locally caught fish promotes patient health and community health:
Serving local fish will improve the health of the community from which the fish is harvested. Like fishing communities, hospitals are important parts of the social and environmental health of their communities. By buying fish from local fisherman, hospitals can showcase underutilized species and balance the demand on the ecosystem. This may inspire others to buy and eat different species, which will enable local fishermen to fish a variety of species and reduce overfishing of certain popular fish. Patients will also benefit from added freshness and the higher levels of many micronutrients in wild seafood.
How is Health Care Without Harm helping hospitals source local food?
Education, outreach and technical assistance to help and engage healthcare and the public:
This post comes to us from Brittany Peats, Health Care Without Harm intern.
First, what is Health Care Without Harm? "Together with our partners around the world, Health Care Without Harm shares a vision of a health care sector that does no harm, and instead promotes the health of people and the environment. The mission of Health Care Without Harm is to transform the health care sector worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment."
Summer 2013 Health Alliance Seafood Throwdown
What's fish got to do with it? Fish connects us to ecosystems and communities:
At HCWH, the idea of environmental nutrition focuses on the collective responsibility of supporting community and ecosystem health by paying attention to how food is raised, harvested, processed, transported and purchased. This perspective fosters a healthy, sustainable food system by focusing on strengthening communities, supporting social justice and conserving natural resources through sustainable practices. Buying locally caught fish is an important way to support environmental nutrition. Many New England towns are built around the fishing industry; maintaining the strength of this industry is crucial to preserve fishing communities and enable local fishermen to continue a generations-long tradition. Why are hospitals buying local seafood?
Locally caught fish promotes patient health and community health:
Serving local fish will improve the health of the community from which the fish is harvested. Like fishing communities, hospitals are important parts of the social and environmental health of their communities. By buying fish from local fisherman, hospitals can showcase underutilized species and balance the demand on the ecosystem. This may inspire others to buy and eat different species, which will enable local fishermen to fish a variety of species and reduce overfishing of certain popular fish. Patients will also benefit from added freshness and the higher levels of many micronutrients in wild seafood.
How is Health Care Without Harm helping hospitals source local food?
Education, outreach and technical assistance to help and engage healthcare and the public:
- Our Balanced Menus Program will assist health care institutions in sourcing sustainable sources of protein, including underappreciated species of seafood from the local fishing communities.
- To support a pathway to internal hospital purchasing, HCWH worked with the seafood aggregator Red’s Best to source through Sysco and Sodexo accounts. Red’s Best operates out of Boston to aggregate the seafood catch of small and medium-sized day boat fishermen and sell their catch to local wholesalers. As a result of this new partnership, in 2013, Red’s Best sold 5,410 pounds of fish to 16 healthcare facilities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
- We collaborated with NAMA on Seafood Throwdowns to engage with the healthcare community. These friendly competitions between pairs of hospital chefs charged with preparing the best hospital dish using a whole local seafood species and seasonal farmers market ingredients introduce hospital staff, visitors, and patients to underutilized seafood and increase demand for these varieties through hospital purchasing.
- The Celebrate the Fruits of our Ocean campaign with NAMA and the Boston Collaborative for Food and Fitness raised awareness about the challenges of the fishing community and new species of seafood to Boston’s farmers markets. These communities now have a direct source of fresh, culturally appropriate and environmentally friendly seafood.
This post comes to us from Brittany Peats, Health Care Without Harm intern.
Wednesday 26 March 2014
How the discards ban could spell the end of family owned fishing vessels
The following article by Bertie Armstrong, chief executive, Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, was published in The Buchan’s Observer’s annual Fishing Review for 2014. In it, he warns that if the forthcoming discards ban is implemented badly, it could spell the demise of traditional family owned fishing vessels.
There is no business quite like fishing, and as each year passes, the challenges facing our crucial sector seem to gather pace with frightening speed.
The next few years are likely to be particularly fraught, most notably because of the introduction of the discards ban, or ‘land-all obligation’. For our mackerel and herring fishermen it will come into force on 1 January 2015, and for most other fishermen it will be gradually phased in over the following few years, with all species covered by 1 January 2019. Those representing our interests supported and signed up for this – and now we have to face the consequences.
The challenges of making the discards ban a reality in the timescale will vary by fishery. A few, like the creel sector and some specific areas in the prawn fisheries already have low discards and will encounter less difficulty. The real struggle will be in the mixed fisheries pursued by the whitefish fleet and most of the North Sea prawn fleet. Here, the question of what to do with “choke species” – the point where an individual vessel runs out of its lowest quota in the mix and has to stop fishing altogether – is no closer to an answer than it was when first posed six or seven years ago.
We have several mitigating factors – some progress on selectivity, the prospect of quota uplift, various flexibilities in the new Common Fisheries Policy regulation, but we still have no clear vision about how the ban can be implemented without radical changes in the worst-affected fleets. If we do nothing, the default radical change will be very significant consolidation of those fleets, moving away from the present Scottish model of family and small consortium ownership of vessels with a strong local attachment. Instead, there will be a much smaller number of much bigger vessels, each coping more easily with the discard ban given the flexibility of a proportionally greater access to quota and under a different ownership model. It may be that a degree of consolidation is simply unavoidable, but now is the time when the choices facing the industry must be urgently addressed to make sure that we drive those choices rather than the other way round.
A recent tripartite agreement between the EU, Norway and the Faroese brought at least a partial agreement on the long-standing mackerel dispute and this in turn finally brought around an agreement between the EU and Norway on catching opportunities in the North Sea, including a 5% increase in the cod quota.
Many of the quota allocations just agreed for the North Sea are in line with long-term management plans. We had hoped that there would have been a bigger increase in the North Sea cod quota, but at least the proposed cut has been successfully fended-off. A cut in the cod quota at this stage would have made a mockery of the European Commission’s commitment to end discarding as it would only have led to fishermen dumping good quality marketable fish overboard, given the abundance of the stock. The science shows that a 5% increase in the cod quota will lead to a significant increase in the stock over the coming year.
The recovery of North Sea cod is a remarkable success story but there needs to be a sensible long-term approach to the management of the stock that recognises that biomass is increasing, fishing pressure is falling and that the stock is being harvested sustainably.
But against this complicated and difficult background, there is also much to be encouraged by. Take the public perception of fishing as an example. In recent years it has come under unprecedented attack by ill-informed journalists and armchair environmental experts. We’ve all seen the headlines about their only being ‘100 adult cod left in the North Sea’, when the actual figure was over 20 million. And then there was ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ on Channel 4, which again vilified fishermen.
Of course the truth is very different, and indignant fishermen rose up against these inaccuracies, and guys like Peter Bruce of the Budding Rose and many others Tweeted and Facebooked their way to putting the record straight. The SFF also launched our own website, www.fishingforthetruth.co.uk, which contains a whole host of information on fisheries and how our fishermen are working towards a sustainable future. And all these actions are working, with the most recent ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ programme providing a much more balanced picture, recognising the hard work of our fishermen.
The truth is that the majority of our fish stocks are recovering, thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of our fishermen to develop selective gear, observing closed areas to fishing to protect spawning and juvenile fish, along with many other measures. This is all positive news, but there also needs to be a structure put in place that ensures there is a future for fishing, and which encourages youngsters to enter our great industry.
For that to be achieved, there needs to be much greater recognition from the EU and our national governments of the complexities of fishing and the need to develop much more sensible and coherent fisheries management measures that actually work in practice, rather than just look good on paper. And how do you do that? Well, there is only one way – work and consult closely with the people who understand fishing the best – the fishermen themselves.
There is no business quite like fishing, and as each year passes, the challenges facing our crucial sector seem to gather pace with frightening speed.
The next few years are likely to be particularly fraught, most notably because of the introduction of the discards ban, or ‘land-all obligation’. For our mackerel and herring fishermen it will come into force on 1 January 2015, and for most other fishermen it will be gradually phased in over the following few years, with all species covered by 1 January 2019. Those representing our interests supported and signed up for this – and now we have to face the consequences.
The challenges of making the discards ban a reality in the timescale will vary by fishery. A few, like the creel sector and some specific areas in the prawn fisheries already have low discards and will encounter less difficulty. The real struggle will be in the mixed fisheries pursued by the whitefish fleet and most of the North Sea prawn fleet. Here, the question of what to do with “choke species” – the point where an individual vessel runs out of its lowest quota in the mix and has to stop fishing altogether – is no closer to an answer than it was when first posed six or seven years ago.
We have several mitigating factors – some progress on selectivity, the prospect of quota uplift, various flexibilities in the new Common Fisheries Policy regulation, but we still have no clear vision about how the ban can be implemented without radical changes in the worst-affected fleets. If we do nothing, the default radical change will be very significant consolidation of those fleets, moving away from the present Scottish model of family and small consortium ownership of vessels with a strong local attachment. Instead, there will be a much smaller number of much bigger vessels, each coping more easily with the discard ban given the flexibility of a proportionally greater access to quota and under a different ownership model. It may be that a degree of consolidation is simply unavoidable, but now is the time when the choices facing the industry must be urgently addressed to make sure that we drive those choices rather than the other way round.
A recent tripartite agreement between the EU, Norway and the Faroese brought at least a partial agreement on the long-standing mackerel dispute and this in turn finally brought around an agreement between the EU and Norway on catching opportunities in the North Sea, including a 5% increase in the cod quota.
Many of the quota allocations just agreed for the North Sea are in line with long-term management plans. We had hoped that there would have been a bigger increase in the North Sea cod quota, but at least the proposed cut has been successfully fended-off. A cut in the cod quota at this stage would have made a mockery of the European Commission’s commitment to end discarding as it would only have led to fishermen dumping good quality marketable fish overboard, given the abundance of the stock. The science shows that a 5% increase in the cod quota will lead to a significant increase in the stock over the coming year.
The recovery of North Sea cod is a remarkable success story but there needs to be a sensible long-term approach to the management of the stock that recognises that biomass is increasing, fishing pressure is falling and that the stock is being harvested sustainably.
But against this complicated and difficult background, there is also much to be encouraged by. Take the public perception of fishing as an example. In recent years it has come under unprecedented attack by ill-informed journalists and armchair environmental experts. We’ve all seen the headlines about their only being ‘100 adult cod left in the North Sea’, when the actual figure was over 20 million. And then there was ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ on Channel 4, which again vilified fishermen.
Of course the truth is very different, and indignant fishermen rose up against these inaccuracies, and guys like Peter Bruce of the Budding Rose and many others Tweeted and Facebooked their way to putting the record straight. The SFF also launched our own website, www.fishingforthetruth.co.uk, which contains a whole host of information on fisheries and how our fishermen are working towards a sustainable future. And all these actions are working, with the most recent ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ programme providing a much more balanced picture, recognising the hard work of our fishermen.
The truth is that the majority of our fish stocks are recovering, thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of our fishermen to develop selective gear, observing closed areas to fishing to protect spawning and juvenile fish, along with many other measures. This is all positive news, but there also needs to be a structure put in place that ensures there is a future for fishing, and which encourages youngsters to enter our great industry.
For that to be achieved, there needs to be much greater recognition from the EU and our national governments of the complexities of fishing and the need to develop much more sensible and coherent fisheries management measures that actually work in practice, rather than just look good on paper. And how do you do that? Well, there is only one way – work and consult closely with the people who understand fishing the best – the fishermen themselves.
Spring is still coiled ready for action it seems as the sun hides away in Mount's Bay
The netting fleet have a few days of the neap tide left before one of the biggest tides of the year hits the coast...
less than sunny skies make for a foreboding look as the boats head out at first light...
with boats like the Ajax facing a long steam to the grounds...
on the market the fish are fast moving after each sale...
putting pressure on the collection of data for Cefas to be completed before the auction reaches the boat in question...
not so heavy megrim fishing at the moment...
but the lemons are best at this time of year with them at their meatiest in the body...
a set of open gills display the gill filaments fully red with the blood near the surface which allows for easy transfer of oxygen from the water...
beamer bass by the box...
and best tub gurnards all surely head for a top restaurant...
keep an eye on the auction in progress…
just a couple of trips from the net fleet including best Cornish hake...
and a big selection of roes...
early morning workout for some...
there is still good fishing to be had at the end of the cuttle season...
the harbour staff will be pleased when its over so the buildings can become sepia ink free...
tons of cuttles lined up and ready to go...
looks like the old lugger Children's Friend may get to be saved yet...
after this morning the tide takes a big jump each day.
Tuesday 25 March 2014
Don't miss the The International Film Festival "Fishermen of the World" 2014
The International Film Festival « Fishermen of the World » 2014 is soon opening. On show, 38 full and short length films, all dedicated to fishermen and filmed all around the world.
The Festival will sail towards 20 countries and all around the planet and 18 films are of foreign origin. They all offer a great cinema experience with many movies nominated in international film festivals. Several films are being shown for the first time. 13 films are competing including 8 full length films and 5 short length films.
In Preview and with free access, the Festival's 6th several film festivals « Les Grandes Marées » : the poetic story of a father and son both fishermen in Brittany and a documentary, the adventurous « Au cœur de la Tourmente » on the risks taken by fishermen in the South Pacific.
The opening film of the Festival is the renowned icelandic film“ The Deep” by Balthasar Kormakur. It tells the story of a fisherman surviving a shipwreck against the odds. Then the Festival will show 24 films in the “ Selection Reflet du Monde “ from the 27th of March in the Paul Ricoeur auditorium in Lorient.
These films are 24 works of art. The selection shows the beauty and violence of the oceans and informs the public on the injustice of globalisation and the difficult condition of living of fishermen. The environmental questions including fish stocks management are also important. The Festival is happy to show several short movies made by fishermen themselves and by fishing organisations to explain to the general public what the fisherman's job is.
A selection “La Boite à Films” is also on show with several documentaries on fishing with free access to the public. Two photos exhibitions on fishermen will take place during the Festival. The Festival has 2 jurys, one made of professionals and one made of high school students. Each jury will give its own award. The professional jury is made of international film makers and sea professionals.
Discover the 2014 films on our web site : http://www.pecheursdumonde.org
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