Two perfectly reasonable questions are being asked across the industry, as the deadline for applying the landings obligation to the whitefish sector looms closer. This article will not provide the answers to those questions. It can only shed some light on the process under way that may, in time, provide the answers.
Landings Obligation
The landing obligation comes into force for demersal species
in January next year. If the member states are going to submit joint
recommendations for regional discard plans, these must be agreed and submitted by
this June at the latest. If they cannot agree, the default is a Commission
regulation and nobody wants that; least of all the Commission.
It is nearly 24 months since an opportunist celebrity chef
and a gung-ho Commissioner, and their
allies, succeeded in persuading the European Parliament and the Council of
Ministers that a landings obligation would be a good idea. But at this stage, a
matter of months away from its implementation, we know next to nothing about
how the new regime will operate.
This is not because of inactivity by any party. The discard
ban for pelagic species naturally took precedence as it had an earlier start date.
But the delay is also because the implementation of the landings obligation in
mixed demersal fisheries is fiendishly difficult.
The landings obligation landings is billed to to auger in the
most significant change to the management rules since the CFP was established.
If this is the case, fishing vessels will need time to adapt. Operators will need
to know the rules under which they will have to operate.
Land all quota
species
The landings obligation itself is simple enough: all quota
species will have to be landed and will count against quota. But fisheries
managers know that in a system of Total Allowable Catches in mixed gear,
multi-species, fisheries, where quota distribution is based on international
and domestic relative stability, and
where selecting out unwanted catch on the seabed is not always possible, this
is a recipe for economic and social disaster. Exemptions, phasing, and quota
flexibilities will all be necessary to make the landings obligation workable.
This however, inevitably makes the regime more complicated.
Regional Discard
Plans
The NFFO has been working with the North Sea and North
Western Waters advisory councils, who have in turn been working with the member
states to design and agree a workable approach.
North Sea
The North Sea AC has taken the view that the least worst, and certainly the simplest
and cleanest way to phase-in the landings obligation would be to start in the
first year with only one species; then learn the lessons, allow the industry
and system managers time to adapt before moving on to the next species. All
vessels operating within a sea area would be required to land the same species.
This is the way that Norway introduced their discard ban, incrementally adding
species and making the necessary adjustments along the way.
This is not what is going to happen. The problem is that under
extreme political pressure the CFP basic regulation fell into the old trap of
being too prescriptive and having insufficient grasp of the realities fishing. This
early mistake has subsequently led to much soul searching between member states,
and within the Commission, about whether it is possible to “break the whitefish
cluster” of cod, haddock, whiting and saithe, to ease in the landings obligation
in its first year by applying the discard ban to only one or two those species;
or similarly, to break the flatfish cluster, with sole and plaice treated differently.
North West Waters
The NWWAC and member states took the view from the outset that
given the diversity of fisheries in its area of jurisdiction, a fisheries
approach to phasing would be required. However, there is no disguising the
difficulty of defining separate fisheries when different rules will apply on
either side of any boundary that is created.
Whilst some member states seem to favour using the gear
categories developed the under the EU Cod Plan, ( TR1, Tr2, BT1, BT2 etc,) others
point to the inherent rigidity in such an approach. The other weakness of an
approach based on gear categories is that its dependence on use of a particular
mesh size range, at exactly the time when vessels might need to change their
mesh size (and other aspects of their fishing operations) to reduce unwanted
catch, is potentially to put an obstacle in the way of vessels’ adaptation to
the landings obligation and to set up the kind of perverse incentives that we
have seen before in the Cod a Plan.
An alternative is to look at what a vessel has caught in the
past in order to allocate it to a particular fishery with particular discard
rules. The trouble with this is obvious: it is backward looking and is
bound to come into friction with any
significant level of change in what has always been a dynamic industry.
A NWWAC drafting group has suggested a radically different approach:
let the fisherman decide, at the start of the year, or season, or even before
the start of each trip, in which of the defined fisheries vessel is
participating (whitefish, nephrops,
hake, flatfish). This would determine the discard rules under which the vessel
is operating, at least for the three years 2016-2018 over which the landings
obligation will be phased in. Linked to a phased approach, this elective approach would limit the
landings obligation to one species in year 1, this approach seems to marry
simplicity with flexibility. The mandatory use of electronic logbooks in all
over-12 metre vessels goes a long way to making such an approach workable.
Again, the signs are that it is highly unlikely that this approach will be used
– but not for any coherent or rational reason but for short term administrative
convenience.
Meetings Meetings
In order to deliver regional
discard plans by the due deadlines, agreed and discussed with the advisory
councils, an intense programme of meetings is under way. Fisheries Directors are
meeting regularly in High Level
meetings to agree broad strategy and principles; officials from the member
states also work in technical
meetings on the design and details of their discard plans. Phasing, definition
of fisheries, quota uplift, high survival exemptions, de minimis exemptions,
minimum conservation reference sizes; these are the issues that the member
states are tussling with. There are significant differences in approach between
the member states. Some take a more purist legalistic approach whilst others
already less focused on legal texts than in designing something that works in
the real world. The pressure is on them, however, to come to a unanimous agreement on the content
of the discard plans.
Sometime in May
Probably sometime in May, the
advisory councils will be asked to comment on the draft discard plans. These will
indicate what species will have to be landed in the first year; they will also indicate
where the member states intend to apply for exemptions on the grounds of the
high survival rate of species when they are returned to the sea; they will also
specify de minimis exemptions, to be
used where there are problems in making the fishery more selective, or where there are disproportionate costs
involved.
Quota Uplift
At that point fishing vessels will
be able to begin to assess the implications of the discard ban in its first
year. But there will still be an important piece of the jigsaw missing: the
quota uplift that will accompany TACs being based on total catches rather than
just landings. That will not be known fully until the December Council,
although pointers will be available when ICES publishes its annual advice in
late May, early June. One of the appealing features of the species approach was
that it would require the addition of entirety of the estimated discards into
each TAC. A fisheries approach, with different vessels operating under
different discard rules means that any quota uplift is likely to be partial and
raise difficult questions over the distribution of the quota uplift. A further
worry is that ICES data on discard rates in the different fisheries can best be
described as patchy. In some fisheries there has been pretty comprehensive
observer cover and the discard estimates are pretty sound; in other fisheries
the assessments depend on something closer to educated guesswork. All of this
could have a profound impact on the level of quota uplift in specific fisheries
and the likelihood of chokes.
High Survival
It makes sense to most people to
return to the sea that part of unwanted catch that has a good chance of
surviving and adding to the biomass of that species. A rational approach to a
landings obligation would have preceded the ban by an extensive period of data collection and analysis.
Knowing which species exhibit high survival, under which conditions, is
critically important to making sensible decisions. The rushed timetable
precludes this and so member states are going to have to make some
political/pragmatic judgements on which survival exemptions to include in their
joint recommendations for discard plans. We think that it makes more sense to
grant exemptions, then remove them if the evidence isn’t their to support them,
than to create onshore infrastructures to deal with unwanted catch, only to
abandon them when the evidence suggests that an exemption is justified. The key
criterion should be whether an exemption increases or decreases overall fishing
mortality of the species concerned.
Steps
Once the discard plans are agreed
by the regional member states, they will be submitted to the Commission. The
Commission’s quality control body, the
Scientific, Technical, Economic Committee for Fisheries, will then be asked
to evaluate the regional discard plans. If considered acceptable they will then
be adopted through a Commission delegated act. The European Parliament will be
invited to express an opinion (but only an opinion).
Only at that stage will vessels
begin to have some idea in broad outline of what lies in store for them in 2016.