Angling for a solution

Civitas, 27 May 2009

Motivated by the undeniable failure of the existing EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), EU member states’ fishing Ministers have agreed to “radically decentralise” a new CFP, due to come into force in 2012.

With its excessive centralised command, the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy – established in 1983 – is almost universally condemned as a failure. A reformed policy must facilitate a sustainable fishing industry; protecting both fish stocks and fisherman. As evidenced under current CFP measures (since the CFP was last reformed in 2002), rigid centralised control and constant interference have failed.

The current EU Common Fisheries Policy is lost at sea without a paddle. It has led to a “worst of both worlds” scenario where fish stocks have been damaged by over-fishing (falling by a third in the last 10 years) and fishermen have been hurt by restrictions to their labour (in April of this year, frustrations over CFP quotas sparked the blockade of three channel ports (Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne) by French fishermen. The industrial action only ended when the French fisheries minister offered the fishermen €4m in aid. The national representative could not give them the demanded increase in “allowable catches”, because quotas are controlled by the EU…)

Greenpeace insist that the CFP is “rotten to the core and the EU knows it”. And Czech Minister for Agriculture, Jakub Sebesta, summarised the dilemma stating that there are “fewer fish, there is falling productivity and fleets are getting smaller”. In response, Greenpeace suggests halving Europe’s fishing fleet… but strict environmentalism ignores the plight of fishermen and hinders their attempts to earn a living. With an increasing world population, demand for fish products to rising rapidly, yet attempts to exploit this market in the EU have been hindered by dwindling stock levels (in 2006 the EU imported 3 times the level of fisheries products that it exported).

The EU must compressively ‘gut and skin’ the CFP to remove unfair and counter-productive measures.
The “Total Allowable Catches” currently dictates the amount of fish stock that can be brought ashore. In order to “tackle” the EU rules, fishermen dump any excess (frequently dead) fish back into the sea, which damages the environment. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea estimates that “for every kilogram of cod that was taken back to port from the North Sea in 2007 another kilogram was thrown back”. Danish Fisheries Minister, Eva Kjer Hansen, proposed reform to measure how much fish is caught in total, rather than how much is actually brought back to shore, to remove the incentive to dump fish. She insisted that a similar scheme has been successful in Denmark since 2008.

Huw Irranca Davies, the UK Fisheries Minister insisted that “sustainable quotas”, which are currently at the mercy of conflicting scientific predictions and pressure group politics, must be “informed by good regional science and management”. Mr Davies insisted that creditable reform requires a “longer term view”, but long-term goals must not compromise the livelihoods of fishermen today. Fishermen and environmentalists share a common interest in maintaining sustainable fish stocks, but if any additional incentives are required, they must be regionally constructed and locally enforced.

Following Westminster’s recent expenses scandals, UK politicians are scrambling to argue that “decentralising power” will “fix politics”. If ministers can similarly convince Eurocrats “hook, line and sinker” of the merits of CFP decentralisation, perhaps lessons can be learnt to reform the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The EU’s 2008 CAP “health check” failed to resist paying farmers not to farm…