Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 22 OCTOBER 2002
MR MARK
TASKER AND
MS ANDREA
CAREW
Chairman
1. Good morning. This is the first meeting of
the Select Committee's investigation into the Reform of the Common
Fisheries Policy, so thank you very much for coming along to give
us your evidence. We have, for the record, Mr Mark Tasker, Head
of Marine Advice from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee—welcome—and
Andrea Carew from English Nature, where you are the acting Senior
Fisheries Advisor. It is going to be a relatively short investigation,
so that we can get our report out for obvious time constraints,
because I think most people recognise that possibly this year
and the beginning of next year is the most important time for
the fisheries industry, possibly for the last 30 years, and it
is an extremely tight timetable. We are very grateful to you for
coming along at relatively short notice. If I could perhaps kick
off with the first rather general question in terms of what may
be the overall assessment. JNCC has said that the "state
of Europe's fish stocks and fisheries has declined dramatically
since the last review of the CFP in 1992," 10 years ago,
and that there is a very strong risk that we might get a complete
collapse. Perhaps you could set the scene for us. What is your
assessment of the current state of fish stocks and fisheries in
Europe? How close are we to a possible collapse?
(Mr Tasker) First of all, thank you very
much for inviting us to come along and for inviting us to give
evidence in the first place. To answer your question directly,
we are not actually the experts on this but we believe our colleagues
working in ICES (the International Council for the Exploration
of the Sea) are. They are due to publish their latest assessment
this coming Friday and I believe that the fishing industry will
get a preview of this on Thursday. I do quite a lot of work within
ICES, thus I am fairly well aware of what is there, although I
cannot be precise about it. My understanding is that the cod stock
since last year has halved again and the advice they are putting
in is that there should be no fishing on cod in the coming year
and no fishing on any other fish that would catch cod in that
fishery in the next year. That is by far and away the most dramatic
advice I think we will get from ICES. I couch this with "I
think" because I have not actually seen the advice yet but
that is what I believe it is going to say. I cannot say anything
more than that. There are very, very few stocks that are in a
state which is called "within safe biological limits"—there
are one or two, but very few—and with many of those in fact
you will catch some of the species which are outside safe biological
limits in trying to fish for them.
2. So this Friday is likely to be a bit of a
bombshell in the fishing industry as a whole.
(Mr Tasker) I would imagine so—though if the
industry do not know it yet, they are in denial.
3. Have you any comment?
(Ms Carew) Just to solidify, I suppose, what my colleague
has just said. I think the only real thing of substance which
I can contribute here which I think everyone should take account
of is that I hail from Newfoundland, Canada, from Grand Bank,
and I can tell you—I have had about eight years' experience
in fisheries at home and about a year's experience in fisheries
in the UK and more generally across Europe—that to me it
looks like we are really on the brink here. This is now an opportunity
to take stock (pardon the pun) and to figure out what it is we
need to do to move ahead. We think some of our comments in the
consultation we have submitted to you outline some of that quite
clearly, but this is the opportunity to grasp on to this. That
might delve into an answer to a question you might be asking us
in a moment, but just to back-up what Mr Tasker was saying.
4. Did English Nature contribute to this study
that is coming out?
(Ms Carew) Yes. We should clarify. The Joint Nature
Conservation Committee is really the bringing together of the
countryside agencies: English Nature, which I represent; Countryside
Council for Wales; and Scottish Natural Heritage. We come together,
form a consensus and formally respond to items such as national
consultations through JNCC.
Mr Mitchell
5. Why is this happening? You have mentioned
Canada. There seems to be an argument which I cannot quite get
to the bottom of, as it were, in fisheries, as to whether it is
due to climatic changes in the temperature of the water and the
support systems, which cod feed on and are sustained by—in
other words, the waters are getting warmer and the cod are therefore
migrating north—or due to over-fishing?
(Ms Carew) I think it is a combination of several
of those factors and we clearly need to get a handle on the impact
that climatic change and ecosystem functioning, the process, is
having on cod stocks, but I think it would be severely remiss
of us not to account for it and begin to account for the impacts
of fishing. The fishing mortality that we have imposed on the
stocks I think is the number one contributing factor and that
is something that we can control. The other factors are a little
bit more out of our grasp but that does not preclude a judgement
to strive to understand what they are. But the fishing mortality
that we impose upon stocks is the one thing that we can take account
of.
6. The measures that deal with one are different
from the measures for dealing with the other, are they not?
(Ms Carew) I am not sure what you are getting at here.
7. If it is due to over-fishing, it is a matter
of control.
(Ms Carew) Yes.
8. If it is due to climatic changes, then other
considerations apply and different systems are going to have to
be implemented for different waters to which the cod might be
migrating.
(Ms Carew) Yes.
(Mr Tasker) If I could just enlarge a little bit on
that. Essentially climate will act at the stage of breeding, but
if there are not enough fish there to breed they will not breed.
Most fish breeding strategies are such that you have a long adult
period. Most cod do not start breeding until about seven and can
live until they are 20 or more, if they are left alone, but if
you take away that spare capacity then you do get these changes
in ability to breed. It may be a long-term cause, such as climatic
change, it may be short term, more annual type, shift, but if
you take away the buffer that is provided by having a long-lived
adult stock then they will not breed, they cannot breed. You are
into a spiral downwards. Cod differ a bit from some of the other
white fish, such as the whiting and the haddock, in that, certainly
in Europe waters, they have been beyond this area which is called
"safe biological limits" and below that they effectively
have impaired breeding. That is almost the definition of it: your
spawning stock size or spawning stock bio-mass (to use the technical
term) is below a level that will allow proper breeding or full
breeding potential. Undoubtedly over-fishing has caused that loss
of adults—they do not go because of weather—but, once
you get to that stage because of over-fishing, weather might come
into the game.
9. I get that point. I think it is very valid.
Let us move on to effort limitation because you are saying that
the proposed overall reduction in effort of 8.5 per cent is not
enough because productivity of the industry is increasing by about
8 per cent a year, so it gets quickly negated. What level of reduction
would be adequate in your view to get sustainable catches?
(Mr Tasker) Again I refer back to the people who know
better, who are ICES. Just to explain, for those who do not know,
ICES is effectively, a bringing together of all the best fisheries
scientists from each of the European and North American nations
to pool their expertise and to come up with the best available
advice. So this is not any one person's view and it is not any
one organisation's view; it is the general agreed view of everyone
in fisheries science. For cod, they are talking about a 100 per
cent reduction in effort, and almost every other stock is 40 per
cent or more. If you translate effort into capacity (in other
words, the number of vessels there are there) taking away 40 per
cent of capacity will not necessarily reduce effort by 40 per
cent because some vessels are much more efficient than others.
So capacity reductions probably in the order of 60 per cent or
more are necessary if you want to get to a sustainable state,
but, as I said, for cod they are saying no fishing, a 100 percent
reduction in effort. And of course, as I said earlier, if you
catch other species and you get cod as well, you are going to
impact the cod as well.
10. So you would favour bans in some areas as
well.
(Mr Tasker) You are talking there about closed and
no-take zones. Potentially. We do not know enough about that.
Quite likely, that would be a very helpful tool, but just having
a no-take zone and not reducing the effort would have very little
overall effect.
11. We had a total ban on herring in the North
Sea in the 1970s and that seemed to work very well.
(Mr Tasker) Effectively ICES are saying that, as I
understand it, now, in this year's advice. A complete ban on cod
catching. If I understand what has happened in Sweden, they have
already brought that in for the Swedish fisheries, because Baltic
cod are in the same dire state that North Sea cod are in. Which
reminds me, we also have the migration bit. Where have they migrated
to, if they have migrated? There is nowhere that has good cod
at the moment.
12. What about industrial fishing. There is
a substantial by-catch of edible fish in any industrial fishing
programme. Does that have to be stopped, in your view? Not to
put words into your mouth.
(Mr Tasker) We should certainly take account of that
by-catch. There are some quite good observer schemes now being
carried out. The way you can assess how much by-catch there—the
only way to do—it, really—is to put someone out there
to record it. Fishermen are fishing too much, they have got their
own job to do, so putting someone, an independent observer, on
vessels is the only way to do it. There are three main industrial
fisheries. One is on sandeels, another one is on young sprat,
that also catches herring, and another one is on Norway pout.
This is in the Northern European seas, but there are obviously
industrial catches elsewhere. The sandeel fishery is remarkably
clean; it does catch a few other things but it is low. The sprat
fishery catches quite a lot of herring, but one of the few stocks
that is in quite good shape at the moment is the herring—and
maybe we will come back to that later. The Norway pout fishery
has fairly strict rules about the amount they catch—Norway
pout, sorry, is like a small cod. They have fairly strict rules
on the amount of by-catch in that. So, again, yes, to answer your
question, if there is too much cod being caught in there, or haddock
or anything else, then it would be closed and is closed quite
frequently—or at least they would have to get rid of the
fish. While we are on by-catch, my understanding is that last
year the total catch of haddock, allowed and landed catch, was
40,000 tonnes; the amount of haddock discarded in all the other
fisheries was 120,000 tonnes. Sorry, I think that is outrageous.
13. It is.
(Mr Tasker) I am going to be quite brutal about it.
I would love someone in the fishing industry to explain why that
was the case.
14. Speaking as a discarded haddock, "Absolutely"!
The CFP reform is a kind of multi-annual framework, which is intrinsically
a good idea. The problem is how effectively it is going to work.
What do you see as being the advantage of multi-annual plans?
(Mr Tasker) I think in brief summary it is getting
the politics out of fisheries management.
15. Can the CFP ever do that? Politics are at
its heart.
(Mr Tasker) I do not think you should ever do it completely.
Of course not. It is a societal choice as to what you should catch
and what state your seas should be in and how much environmental
damage is done and so on and so on, and the proper representative
way of doing that is through the political process. The problem
at the moment is that there is so much horse trading going on
that we tend to disregard the environmental side or even the effect
on the fish stocks' side in that process. The point, as I understand
it, is not to give, as some people would say, the Commission more
power; the point is to try to move the political process at least
one step back. I think that is very important because I think
a lot of the problem with the decision taking around the fisheries
has been basically political horse trading. Of course that happens,
but less of it would be a good idea.
16. That is the principal advantage of the multi-annual
plans.
(Mr Tasker) I think so.
17. Do you think the multi-annual plans could
be adjusted to sustain mixed species fisheries, which is the essence
of the problem in the North Sea and around the British coast.
(Mr Tasker) Yes. Essentially, as I understand the
way the Commission would like to set these up, is that the politicians
decide on a set of rules by which fisheries should be managed,
and in establishing those rules one would have to take account
of those inter-species, multi-species interactions that you are
hinting at. So, if you have got a mixed demersal fishery, you
would need a rule saying that, for instance, if stock X gets below
a certain level then you have to close that mixed fishery—which
is effectively what ICES is saying this year. So it is a set of
rules and then you basically hand it over to technicians of the
Commission to implement those rules. So the debate is around the
rules, not around boxes of fish, and that is actually a better
place for the political debate to occur.
18. That is the process which you want to introduce
the fishermen to.
(Mr Tasker) Absolutely. Quite. But they should understand
what the rules are and why they are there and the rest of it.
19. Can that be done? Because there is a long
history of the fishermen distrusting the scientists in the first
place and constant argument, and an even longer history of the
fishermen distrusting each other—international fishermen
and even sections within the British industry. How can fishermen
be integrated in the policy?
(Ms Carew) Perhaps we can touch on a concept that
we responded to in our consultation submission to you, and that
is the idea of regionalisation or a regional approach to fisheries
management through the establishment of Regional Advisory Councils.
We can refer you to a study that our sister countryside agency
did, Countryside Council for Wales, which looked at the Irish
Sea as a case study. I think one way of addressing the question
that you pose to us is regionalisation, and the establishment
of Regional Advisory Councils as a way for stakeholders, most
importantly the fishermen, to have their voice heard by fisheries
managers, by people on the Commission, and surely that could be
a way. Primarily it would be a more pragmatic and more practical
way of accounting for fisheries impacts at a regional level, and
local level, if you will, but it is also a way of ensuring that
fisherman and scientists are working much more closely together
and are coming, as much as possible, to a consensus view on what
information needs to be fed up to the Commission. Maybe that is
a way forward. We certainly believe it is, and it is a very strong
and appealing alternative versus the status quo. That might be
a way to begin to abolish the mistrust between the fishermen themselves,
and certainly between the fishermen and scientists, and between
fisheries managers and politicians even. Everyone is part of the
equation.
(Mr Tasker) If I may chip in, even without the Regional
Advisory Councils, the fishermen have been invited by ICES this
year, across to ICES, to be briefed on their process and their
early results, and, as I said right at the beginning, I believe
that north of the border the Fisheries Research Service, the Marine
Laboratory in Aberdeen, will be meeting fishermen on Thursday
and south of the border CEFAS (the Centre for Environment, Fisheries
and Aquaculture Science) will be talking to the fishermen south
of the border. So, again, the process of getting that trust, which
I think is absolutely essential, has started. It perhaps should
have started several years ago but better late than never.
(Ms Carew) The meetings to which my colleague refers
are good, and that needs to happen, but this is the scientist
telling the fishermen what they have found, whereas I think we
would favour an approach where fishermen can be assured that scientists
have taken on what they are saying—their, if you want to
call it, traditional ecological knowledge, let us say—into
account. That is where we think things should be moving and that
Regional Advisory Councils may be the way to do that.
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