Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-121)
DR EUAN
DUNN
7 DECEMBER 2004
Q100 Chairman: You attach importance
to Environmental Impact Assessments and you think that is a good
idea. These were to be applied to new gear or a new fishery. I
can see what new gear is but what is a new fishery?
Dr Dunn: Maybe I can start by
saying that the reason I believe so much in the Environmental
Impact Assessment is that conservationists and others are constantly
in the reactive mode of having to try to fire fight against damage
to the marine environment, and it would be very nice to have some
frontloading of assessment so that we could head off some of the
difficulties. If we had known about the impact of pair trawling
on bass before it started, if there had been some observer coverage
on these vessels we might have circumvented some of the problems
we see now. What is a new fishery? A new fishery to me is an existing
fishing method in a new area or a new fishing method in an existing
area. I know some people have argued that fishing methods tend
to develop, and so they rightly do, in an incremental way, but
there are points at which you can say that this is, if you like,
a significant shift in a fishing industry.
Q101 Chairman: Something like the shift
to monkfish?
Dr Dunn: Yes, and again this is
something that has not parachuted in from nowhere. CCAMLR, the
Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
set up in 1982 as an ecosystem-based approach to managing the
southern ocean—27 million square kilometres or something.
They have had Environmental Impact Assessment right from the outset
and they have defined very clearly how it should be conducted.
Now, for example, if the Japanese want to go into CCAMLR waters
and fish for krill, that will be subject to an intensive Environmental
Impact Assessment.
Q102 Chairman: If we had that here, for
instance pair trawling for bass, it would have to be done by Europe
rather than by a national government in the sense that only Europe
can deal with that issue.
Dr Dunn: I think many of these
issues need to be dealt with at a European level. The Strategy
Unit Report has put some wind under the wings of Environmental
Impact Assessment and that is very pleasing to see, but that has
to be worked out with our European partners, some of whom will
be less enthusiastic no doubt.
Q103 Chairman: Which the Strategy Unit
was a bit starry eyed about.
Dr Dunn: I do not know, I thought
it was a fairly sober assessment of it.
Q104 Chairman: About the possibilities
of getting action through Europe.
Dr Dunn: Yes. As in many other
areas, but I think that if you speak to the Commission on Environmental
Impact Assessment—and I speak to DG Fish on it from time
to time—they are fairly supportive of it, and I think it
could happen with their support.
Q105 Ms Atherton: We have already talked
a bit about MPAs and broadly you are supportive, but you have
suggested fishery No-Take Zones as an alternative, an addition,
a refinement, shall we say, to the Strategy Unit's proposals.
Can you take us through this?
Dr Dunn: The Strategy Unit report
was seeking—if I do not paraphrase it wrongly—Marine
Protected Areas that would, wherever possible, provide multiple
benefits. So they were looking for closed areas that would benefit
not just fisheries but potentially the biodiversity that lived
in that area and possibly the habitats like the seabed, or whatever.
That would obviously be an ideal situation, to find a marine protected
area where you protected the entire marine food chain and it would
just be a win, win, win everywhere. My feeling is, particularly
in the context of the Strategy Unit Report—and I do not
know whether it shied away from this—that there should have
been a particular focus on looking at, examining, exploring the
potential benefits of No-Take Zones because I think that falls
fairly and squarely within their remit. So while, yes, it is good
to look for Marine Protected Areas that provide multiple benefits,
No-Take Zones are the ones that are perhaps most germane to what
was their remit at the time.
Q106 Ms Atherton: There is always a tension,
is there not, between the community that depends economically
on the fishing and the environment that depends on not being fished?
Dr Dunn: Yes.
Q107 Ms Atherton: As an environmentalist
what answers would you come up with for communities about the
economic issues? Is there an answer?
Dr Dunn: You can answer it in
various ways. In the more progressive Sea Fisheries Committees
that we deal with we see quite clearly that the most progressive
ones already see themselves as stewards of the marine environment,
and in a way, as also Jim Portus said, that all fishermen do;
but the Sea Fisheries Committees have been given particular environmental
duties, like they have to deal with the Habitats and Birds Directives;
they have to deal with the Environment Act. So they already see
themselves as fulfilling a very broad role. I do not think they
separate the economic benefits of their fishing from that, they
just see it that that is the way they should operate now. As far
as the economics for the wider fishing community, I do see a huge
opportunity to ratchet up the way we all think about these things
in a joined-up way, through the Regional Advisory Councils. The
RSPB is fortunate in sitting on the North Sea Regional Advisory
Council—we are one of three NGOs. The dialogue is very transparent,
it is very direct, it is very open between the fishermen and the
NGOs; there is already a lot of bridge building going on. There
are difficult issues but people are beginning to see how the social,
environmental and economic arguments of sustainable development
can be dovetailed together, and I think the RAC is a tremendous
opportunity for people to stop taking up trench warfare positions
against each other. Already I see between the NGOs and the fishing
industry a much more fertile dialogue than there was when I started
this work many moons ago.
Q108 Ms Atherton: That is possibly the
most encouraging thing I have heard when we have been taking evidence,
but if you had been invited to be part of the Strategy Unit and
to have contributed to the report, what would you have added that
was not in the final report?
Dr Dunn: There are two issues
that I drew attention to in our response. The first one was aqua-culture.
I felt that aqua-culture was a gap. The Strategy Unit Report,
and I jotted down its justification for this, said on aqua-culture,
"It seems unlikely that significant quantities of farmed
fish will be produced in the next five years." That is quite
contrary to my understanding. The British Marine Finfish Association
estimates are that in the next ten years Scotland, in particular,
will produce in excess of 50,000 tons of ground fish—cod,
halibut, haddock. When you think of the North Sea quota for cod
for the UK is something in the region of 11,000 tons, it is not
an insignificant amount of commercially produced fish from aqua-culture
and mari-culture, and because we are going to demand more and
more of our fish from aqua-culture in the next few decades, in
my children's lifetime more than half the fish we eat will come
from aqua-culture. Those are the FAO statistics.
David Burnside: So what recommendations
can you make to promote it more effectively and increase the tonnage?
Q109 Chairman: To promote aqua-culture.
Dr Dunn: To promote aqua-culture?
Q110 Chairman: Yes, to produce more?
Dr Dunn: It was not my intention
in drawing attention in that gap to promote aqua-culture. We did
have a long discussion about that. I think to some extent aqua-culture
has been used as a kind of safety-net for the failure of wild
capture fisheries, and I think that is a very unhealthy perspective
to take. I think there are many things we need to do to make aqua-culture
more sustainable, and I think that will happen as more and broad
pressure comes to bear on it. For example, aqua-culture is putting
more and more demands on industrial fisheries. We know that industrial
fisheries for sand-eels, for example, are in trouble at the moment.
The Danish fleet last year could only catch 300,000 tons out of
its 700,000 ton quota; the same experience the previous year.
Sand-eel fish, like cod, are one of the species that is being
undermined by a sea temperature rise, so industrial fishing is
potentially adding pressure to climate change and reduced impacts
on sand-eel fisheries.
Q111 Chairman: You say aqua-culture is
more of a threat than a promise?
Dr Dunn: Aqua-culture is going
to create a demand for industrially fish-sourced feed and oil
and that is a problem.
Q112 Chairman: We will come back to that
in a moment.
Dr Dunn: My second point was processing,
because I felt that again the net benefits was—
Chairman: Hang on, we will come back
to that again with David. Let us move on.
Ms Atherton: He said he had two points?
Chairman: I know, the second point is
going to be processing.
Q113 Mr Lazarowicz: First of all can
I apologise for missing the start of the evidence. I had to leave
for a short while. One of the proposals, of course, in the Strategy
Unit Report, as you know, is the role that effort-based management
systems can play in this area. What is your view on this line
of policy and, in particular, how would you think this can play
a role in terms of discards and fish which is in some way caught
illegally?
Dr Dunn: My view is that you will
always find detractors from either policy of tax and quotas on
the one hand and effort-based management on the other, but I think
that fundamentally it is a sounder system to try and control what
happens out at sea than controlling what has landed. I can see
that an effort-based regime might avoid some of the worst excesses
of discarding and misreporting and illegal landings, but, on balance,
I feel that effort control is the way to go.
Q114 Chairman: Would that be effort-control
with a requirement to land all your catch rather than discarding
it?
Dr Dunn: Yes. I can see some merit
in landing everything that you catch rather than discarding in.
There would have to be quite stringent checks and balances. You
would have to be careful that you did not create a market for
the very sort of fish that you had previously tried to avoid catching.
You also do not want vessels filling up their hulls with fish
that they do not regard as of great market value, but I think
it should be explored as a way of proceeding, yes.
Q115 Mr Lazarowicz: How would you go
about selecting the appropriate limits for effort-based approaches
in mixed fisheries, because, as we have heard from other evidence,
if the limit is set at such a high level, there will be a level
at which everyone will be happy because the limit is one which
will sufficiently comprehend the activity that people want to
undertake without limitations. How do you go about selecting the
appropriate limit?
Dr Dunn: It is a very difficult
question to answer, but obviously you start with the same kind
of precise and accurate assessment of the state of the stocks
as you would if you were proposing tax and quotas. It may be a
bit of a digression, but I felt that the Strategy Unit Report
was not as exacting as I had hoped when it came to look at what
kind of fleet we want, which is very much tied up with the sort
of effort that you would exert. It spoke a lot about right-sizing
the fleet, and I felt that a major gap in the analysis of the
report was if you want to right-size the fleet what sort of fleet
do you want to have? Do you want to decommission the highly efficient,
technically sophisticated vessels or do you want to get rid of
the small obsolete vessels? Depending on which you do, you finish
up with a very different deployed capacity, you finish up with
a very different level of fishing efficiency, and I think that
is integral to working out what kind of level of effort you should
have. I may also say, I think there has been insufficient analysis
in this country, as in the rest of Europe, as to the level of
so-called technological creep that we have in the fleet that would
help you to form that sort of analysis. We just do not have those
figures.
Q116 Chairman: Just let me ask you about
this. I cut Candy off I am afraid before when you talked about
the producers. You talk in your evidence about questionable assumptions
about the propensity to import fish. What are these questionable
assumptions?
Dr Dunn: That was my point about
processing really. Again, if I can quote from the report, the
report asserts that "the secondary processing in this country
is from sustainable sources which are unlikely to fail in the
future". That seemed to me to be a breath-taking generalisation.
I was quite astonished to see it in black and white really because,
as you know, in Europe as a whole we now import more than half
our fish, and the sustainability of a lot of those stocks is questionable
and certainly as questionable as many of the stocks that we source
from community waters. I would be concerned, for example, about
New Zealand hoki, which has become the substitute for most of
the European dearth of whitefish. Only a couple of months ago
the New Zealand authorities slashed the New Zealand hoki quota
from 180,000 to 100,000 tons, a reduction of over 40%. It is very
like the cod stock; it has been in decline since the 1980s. The
prawns that we relish in our restaurants, many tiger prawns come
from nurseries and hatcheries in the Far East that have been built
on the back of trashed mangrove swamps. There are all kinds of
things that we eat from abroad about which the sustainability
is questionable. Economists talk about externalities of sustainable
development. How sustainable is it to fly fish here from New Zealand
in terms of aircraft fuel? That has to be factored into sustainable
development.
Q117 Chairman: I think you are probably
right in the case of the threat to imports from Europe, but surely,
in the case of Iceland and Norway the cod stocks are proving sustainable,
and if there is a threat, as in the case of the production of
the hoki quota in New Zealand, the industry just responds by putting
the price up. The supplies might be diminished but they still
come through?
Dr Dunn: Yes, and I agree with
you about the Nordic cod stocks, but it was just the blanket assumption—
Q118 Chairman: That all would be well.
Dr Dunn: —in the report
that this is fine, there is no problem with that and so we will
not look at it. I thought there were quite a few issues that could
have been looked at usefully there. Some of these stocks could
be subject to eco-labelling and some of them, indeed, are and
we should be questioning all of that as consumers.
Q119 Chairman: What would you want the
Strategy Unit to recommend on the processing side?
Dr Dunn: There are a lot of issues
which need to be looked at if we are looking about the sustainable
development of the UK fishing industry as a whole, and it is hard
to say that in a generalisation, but, for example, frozen fish
is flown to China from Britain to be filleted.
Q120 Chairman: From Grimsby too.
Dr Dunn: Then it is flown back
to Britain to be consumed. In terms of sustainable development,
we are all being asked to question whether we should be eating
all sorts of food products that are shipped in from the other
side of the planet. That seems to me a classic example of something
that we should be thinking hard about. To me fisheries is more
than about just the stock development and the stock sustainability
in our seas, it is about how as a nation we are behaving generally
towards our fish consumption habits, and that should be a concern
of government.
Q121 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Let us move on. We are very grateful for your evidence and for
you coming along to explain the background to it today. Thank
you.
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