Call to resurrect Marine Conservation Zones is a ‘Mishmash of Misinformation and ignorance’

Ben Bradshaw’s letter in the Independent on
Sunday is a call to arms for the immediate designation of 127 marine
conservation zones across UK waters, supposedly designed to protect our seas
against a ‘climate change battleground’.

Not
only is he championing a campaign that is a mixture of inaccurate information
and over simplification. It is one that defies scientific evidence.

One point in which he is not wrong is that in
the early 2000s fishermen opposed drastic reductions in the quotas for North
Sea cod. However, he draws the wrong conclusion. Fishermen argued that a
recovery policy based on slashing quotas, would, in a mixed fishery like the
North Sea, have only one result: a dramatic increase in discards. The quotas
were slashed – by 80% over two years – and the result was that for a number of
years for every cod landed one was discarded. The recovery of cod, in spite of
this myopic policy, can be attributed to a number of measures. The reduction in
the whitefish fleets by two thirds, mainly through a series publicly-funded
decommissioning schemes, was the main factor.

These are a number of reasons why the
campaign does not need to be resurrected:

• Closed areas did not play a significant role
  in rebuilding the North American cod stocks in the 1980s. He seems to have made this up.
• Bass stocks have not “collapsed.”
  Poor recruitment and high fishing pressure (both commercial and recreational)
  have led to a decline in biomass. It is important to introduce balanced and
  proportionate constraints to reverse this trend. What this has to do with his
  central thesis: the immediate reduction of 127 marine conservation zones is
  hard to discern.
• West Country boats are not tied-up, as he
  implies, because of overfishing of skates and rays but because of quotas
  drastically reduced to meet a short-sighted and arbitrary policy timetable. Ray
  catches in the Bristol Channel have not varied more than 3% over the last 7
  years.
• The spurious link that he makes between
  marine conservation zones and climate change is just baffling.

This is a disturbing mishmash of ignorance
and misleading assertion. It has at its heart the notion that marine
conservation zones are a panacea for all the ills of the marine environment,
indeed the world, when they are not. Well designed and situated marine
protected areas have an important role to play in protecting vulnerable marine
habitats and species. They are not a panacea or substitute for a range
alternative fisheries management measures which are successfully rebuilding our
fish stocks. Since the year 2000, fishing pressure across all the main species
groups has been halved and fish stocks are responding, some very dramatically,
like North Sea plaice, others more slowly, as we would expect.

There is a very good reason why the
Government’s policy of implementing a network of marine conservation zones,
carefully and progressively is the correct approach. It is not in nature
conservancy’s or in the fishing industry’s interest to put marine protected
areas in the wrong place. Only if you are content to have tick box exercise,
rather than effectively protecting the marine environment could you support the
call for a rushed process driven by gesture politics.

The signatories to Ben Bradshaw’s letter
should know better. Indeed many of them do know better but chose to go along
with a simplistic campaign because it carries a clear but misleading slogan
which they hope the public will support.