IT’S that time of year again in Brussels. Next week the European Union’s fisheries ministers, now 25 strong, will take part in a sacred Christmas ritual: the annual all-night meeting in which they haggle over the future of Europe’s beleaguered fish stocks.
This year the get-together will be especially entertaining, as the European Commission has managed to come up with a proposal to save North Sea cod that seems to have alienated everyone. For the fourth year running, the EC is ignoring scientists’ pleas to stop all cod fishing; instead, it wants to close down fishing for a year in the 40 per cent of the North Sea where fishermen have been finding cod. Its scheme mirrors a report published last week by the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which recommends closing 30 per cent of British waters to commercial fishing. Everyone agrees that excess fishing is the problem, and both bodies have described their proposals as radical.
But they are not radical enough. Closing fishing zones does not cut fishing: it just pushes the boats elsewhere, and the effect can be worse than doing nothing. When Brussels tried this before, shutting the cod’s putative spawning areas during the 2001 spawning season, the boats simply congregated outside, where as it happened lots of the cod were spawning anyway, and ripped up some previously pristine bits of seabed.
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To be fair, the EC has to tread a fine line between scientists who want the politically impossible – an entire industry put on ice for a few years – and politicians who want the biologically impossible – continued big catches. It did the right thing in 2000 and 2001 with successive 60 per cent cuts in cod catches. The UK, for one, has halved its cod fleet over the past two years. North Sea cod stocks seem to have been growing slightly for those two years. What’s more, a new regional committee for the North Sea is at last bringing together fishermen, environmentalists and scientists, who had previously barely been on speaking terms. UK-based scientists are carrying out fisheries research from commercial fishing boats, which is also improving communications.
Despite these bright spots, the outlook for North Sea cod is still far from secure. Stocks are still so low that a couple of bad spawning years could trigger disaster. And because we still don’t properly understand ocean ecosystems, the science of determining sustainable catches, especially at very low stock sizes, is still imprecise. What we do know is that the North Sea cod fisheries could go the way of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, which may never recover.
However, there is one radical idea that might work: pay fishermen not to fish while stocks recover. This is what some politicians, scientists and fishermen themselves are now saying. Unfortunately, it is the one proposal that will not be on the table in Brussels.
