10 December 2015
Everyone makes mistakes. A measure of intelligence is how quickly we learn from those mistakes. We label as stupid, people who fail to learn the lessons of their past errors. How then to describe the European Commission’s failure to learn the lessons of the past? The history Common Fisheries Policy contains a litany of failed measures. In many respects, the current positive outlook for our stocks has been achieved in spite of, rather than because of, management measures. We have gone down so many blind alleys that the law of averages dictated that we would eventually stumble in the right direction. But the journey has been much more painful and taken much longer than necessary.
One of the fundamental lessons that we should have learnt
but don’t seem to have, is that in general, in fisheries management, drastic changes should be avoided.
Extreme measures tend to generate unintended consequences. Often they just
displace the problem into an adjacent area/fleet/ fishery/ stock. Fishing
businesses large and small need time to adapt. The active or tacit support of
fishermen, that is the foundation of successful management, is hard to achieve
against the background of confusion and hostility.
Cod recovery has been the classic example of drastic
management measures – huge TAC reductions, savage days-at-sea restrictions –
when seen in retrospect, were big mistakes. At point one cod was being
discarded in the North Sea for every cod retained on board – a reflection of a
clumsy and blundering policy. It wasn’t until that policy morphed into
something more intelligent – avoidance and improved selectivity – that real
progress was made in rebuilding the biomass.
Despite regionalisation, which at present has its hands full
implementing the landings obligation – possible the most poorly thought-through
CFP measure of all – the Commission seems addicted to these flamboyant,
dramatic, gesture politics that contain within them the seeds of their own
failure.
Bass today is facing the same dilemma. It is clear that
something needs to be done. Initial steps have been taken – catch limits, an
increased landing size and bag limits for recreational anglers. But rather than
assess the impact of these measures and adjust accordingly, the Commission has
now jumped the rails and proposed what amounts to a moratorium on fishing for
bass. Already it is possible to foresee some of the consequences: a huge
increase in discarded bass in mixed fisheries where bass is a bycatch, where
before there was no discard problem; an alienated fleet, forced to throw over
the side the box or two of the most valuable species in their catch; fishing
operations with nowhere else to turn in their struggle to earn a living.
Why do they do it? Why do our political masters fail to
learn the lessons of the past? Is it because they don’t know? Do they not have
the depth of background understanding? Are they in fear of vilification by the
media, always keen to sensationalise and accuse? Is it because their time
horizons are so short?
All of these explanations are in the mix but it is not good
enough.
Until the fundamental lessons are taken on board, we in the
industry will have to deal with the aftermath of intemperate and fundamentally
stupid decisions. By the time the evaluations tell the same sad old story of
faiure, the commissioners, ministers and officials who sign up to these
measures will have left the stage, no doubt feeling that they have done their
duty by creating another piece of legislation. The reality is that they will
have failed us again, and it will be fishermen who pick up the pieces.
It’s not as though we don’t know how success works. Get the
right people in the room: fisheries scientists, fisheries administrators and
fisheries stakeholders. Identify the basic problems, fleet by fleet, region by
region; design and agree appropriate responses. Implement those measures
carefully, incrementally, and in continuous dialogue. It’s not spectacular.
It’s not flamboyant. But time after time it’s the model that delivers when
drastic measures merely shift the problem.
It is only to be hoped that at this late stage, as the
December Council rapidly approaches that a flicker of recall will remind the
Commission and the Council of Ministers what has worked in the past and what
has failed.