|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 122-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (SUB-committee ON THE FUTURE FOR UK FISHING)
Tuesday 7 December 2004 MR JIM PORTUS Evidence heard in Public Questions 73 - 140
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Sub-Committee on the Future for UK Fishing on Tuesday 7 December 2004 Members present Mr Austin Mitchell, in the Chair Ms Candy Atherton David Burnside Mr Mark Lazarowicz Alan Simpson ________________ Memorandum submitted by South Western Fish Producers Organisation
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Jim Portus, Chief Executive, South Western Fish Producers Organisation, examined. Q73 Chairman: Welcome, Jim Portus. Thank you very much for the interesting evidence because it is good to know how a Producer Organisation like yours works - what the number of vessels are and how it enforces discipline and allocates quota and generally organises fishing for the area. I do not want, as we start, to get involved in an argument about in or out of the Common Fisheries Policy, so I have asked the Committee to steer clear of that. But we do want to take up some of the points that are in the Strategy Unit Report and get the views of the fishing producers. So I would like to start with the vexed issue of Individual Transferable Quotas. You do not appear to be all that happy with Individual Transferable Quotas; would you care to give us your views, the views of the PO? Mr Portus: Yes. The view of the organisation in terms of Individual Transferable Quotas is that whilst they may have a use in the management of fisheries' quotas nevertheless we have some very deep concerns about the impact of Individual Transferable Quotas on fishing communities. We have, within our management system, a large number of different ways of managing the quotas. We have a pool of quotas derived from the track record of the fishing vessel owners; we have Individual Transferable Quotas amongst our members; we have quotas that are traded into and out of the organisation by rental, which are utilised by members who wish to go over the monthly pool limit. So it would be wrong of me to say that we are opposed fundamentally to Individual Transferable Quotas because clearly we are not, otherwise we would simply oppose them totally. But we are aware of what can happen with an ITQ system if it is adopted nationally, and it has been observed in other countries around the world where ITQs polarise fishing communities and the quota opportunities gravitate into the hands of a few corporate owners that this has had a severe knock-on effect on fishing communities where you have a significantly reduced number of fishermen going after the opportunities and the wealth of those opportunities goes into the pockets of just a few, rather than being of use to the wider community. So those are our concerns. Q74 Chairman: I will ask David Burnside to follow that up in a minute. The other issue that is made much of by the Strategy Unit is Regional Advisory Units, which I think were really an attempt to say that we want regional management as a substitute to management from Brussels. What is the position of your PO on that? Mr Portus: We want to be involved in the management of fisheries and the only way that we are going to be involved in the management of fisheries is if that management is devolved down to the regions and to the local communities, and we have to have fishermen and their representatives sitting on the groups that consider how best to manage the fisheries and the marine resources generally. So we wish to be involved at the ground floor in the establishment of these Regional Advisory Councils; they are the name of the game in terms of fisheries management in the near term. As you said, you wish to steer clear of the broader issue of the ins and outs of the Common Fisheries Policy so we recognise that as well; we know what the rules are at the moment in fisheries' management, in fisheries terms, and we have to go along with that. So I have been involved in attending meetings of the embryonic Southwest Regional Advisory Council - the Northwest Waters RAC actually is its correct terminology - and it is our hope that Northwest RAC will be established in the early part of 2005 and I sincerely hope that the organisation I represent will be at the table of the executive structure for that organisation, and indeed represented on any of the working groups that have to be established because we recognise that the Northwest RAC area is enormous in terms of the Commission proposals. So we believe that it has to be broken down into lower denominators such as the English Channel, the Celtic Sea, the Irish Sea and other regions, where the fisheries are readily identifiable as having unique characteristics, and the people to look after those fisheries can be selected from within those regions. So for the English Channel, for instance, we would hope that it would be an English, French and Belgian sub-committee to look after the interests of the fish stocks in that area. Q75 Chairman: And you do not see any conflict between the POs and the RACs as long as the POs are involved in the running of the RACs? Mr Portus: That is right. One has to remember that the POs are organisations of fishing vessel owners for the benefit of those owners. There are Producer Organisations in every Member State; they have different functions within those Member States. The UK is, I believe, unique in devolving the management of the quotas to the Producer Organisations in the UK. It is a function that is increasing in use in other Member States, but it is by far from being an absolutely established fact in those other Member States. So it is the mechanism used in the United Kingdom for managing fisheries and therefore the POs should be the bodies that sit on RACs. Q76 David Burnside: Just staying on the subject of quotas, is the Fixed Quota Allocation the favoured, the best and sensible method? Mr Portus: I certainly believe it is. I have good reasons for saying so because I believe that it was a paper that I put together ten years ago that actually resulted in the FQA system being adopted nationally, using the reference period that was used to fix the quotas in time; and industry personnel that I have spoken to within my organisation and within the UK association of POs have all said that FQA system is pretty much a fully functioning system of transferable quotas, whilst not being ITQs as such. Q77 David Burnside: So it does not need any change in the flexibility? Mr Portus: No. The only change that I would bring about, if I could, would be to establish once and for all property rights, rights of tenure, if you like, so that the quotas would become a properly tax deductible and tax benefiting asset of an organisation or corporation. Q78 David Burnside: What are your views on the ring-fenced community quota scheme that has been discussed? Mr Portus: This is one of the areas where the organisation has concerns about ITQs, the need to protect communities and particularly the inshore sector. But I think we are losing sight of the ball; the problem is that the quotas themselves have been diminished so far over the 20 years of their existence that there is not enough to go around by any stretch of the imagination, and certain sectors of the fishing industry have grown without control, in particular the under ten metre sector. There have been significant controls in all over ten metre sectors since the mid-80s and indeed there has been a downward pressure on those sectors. But the inshore fishing community, which relies on the under ten metre sector, has been growing in number and efficiency - some vessels have been cut down from over ten metres in length to under ten metres in length in order to avoid the quotas, and so that sector is trying to cope more and more, catching more and more fish with less and less quota to go between them. And so it is that the Department, DEFRA, is seeking ways of dealing with that problem, by hiving off one part of the quota, which they are going to call a community quota, I suppose, and to say, "Right, we are going to earmark that for this particular sector and the rest will be divvied up amongst the over ten metres." Q79 David Burnside: The Producer Organisations would be responsible for promoting this concept and what financial input would they have in the ring-fenced community quota? Mr Portus: I do not think they would have any, and indeed it seems to me that the intention would be to take away from the POs and their members - the over ten metre members - some of their quotas to dish out to what the government is calling the community, but it is only short of quota because the Department policy has enabled that sector to grow in such an uncontrolled way. Q80 Chairman: The NFFO though suggest that if we are going to have community quotas that the POs would be the best way of organising them. Mr Portus: The membership of POs that is represented by the inshore sector is relatively small. There are thousands of vessels in the inshore sector that do not belong to Producer Organisations at all and never have done, and one could not, within European regulations, compel owners to join Producer Organisations - it is not allowed under Community law. Membership of Producer Organisations has to be voluntary. So I believe that there is always going to be quite a large sector of the fishing industry that is not going to be in Producer Organisations. Many of them do not catch quotas anyway, shell fishermen and the like, and they would not wish to be managed by Producer Organisations - they do not particularly like being managed by DEFRA. Q81 Chairman: Or anybody. Mr Portus: Or anybody for that matter. Q82 Mr Lazarowicz: As you will know, one of the issues is what is actually going on out at sea when it comes to questions of compliance with the various schemes that are in place. The Strategy Unit report, as I am sure you will know, suggested what they described as a "high-transparency system whereby all catches and landings are traced through markets and processors, forensic accounting, on-board observers, risk profiling and administrative points and penalties". Do you feel that these kind of measures are adequate and sensible? And if you have any feelings as to which might be more appropriate, which would you regard as the most practical to implement that kind of measure? Mr Portus: The Department is trying on the one hand to suggest that consumers should have traceability of their fish and that this is a good reason for having overwhelming powers of enforcement, so that we all know when and where the fish is landed and from which vessel it comes. But I am sure that all of us around this table realise that in the millions of individual fish that are landed every year around the UK, and the European Community, for that matter, it is an absolutely impossible task to trace, when you have a fish in front of you on the plate, to say with certainty where that fish came from in terms of back to the cod end. So there is never going to be that traceability from boat to throat, and nor should there be, I believe. What consumers are interested in is the quality of the product and the fact that it is wholesome and good for them. What the enforcers are interested in, from the Commission down through the departments in all Member States, is that the fishermen are compliant with the regulations and, in my opinion, the best way to be compliant with the regulations is first of all to have regulations that the industry not only respects but has also had a hand in creating, and that if you are going to have a quota system you have quotas that reflect what the fishing fleets are actually catching. We do not have that at the moment; after 20 years of quotas we have seen those quotas declining almost in inverse proportion to the growth of the regulations to see to it that the fishermen behave themselves, and clearly there must be something wrong in that. The cost of the regulations and enforcing them on the fishing community is astronomical, and I think that we must do something about reversing that. Q83 Mr Lazarowicz: Is that not then a good argument for moving towards a kind of effort- based management system, which again was one of the SU recommendations? Apart from the advantage of reducing discards it would, on the face of it, be much more simple to enforce than the system based upon the current arrangements. Mr Portus: Absolutely, and on the face of it an effort-based system has great attractions, provided ultimately that the amount of time that is made available to the fishermen is also in proportion to what they were doing on the day that you switch from one system to another. When you switch from one to another you tend to create victims, people who fall by the wayside, and no changeover should do that. We must be at great pains, if we are going to change from a system of quotas to a system of effort limitation, to avoid collateral damage amongst innocent bystanders in the fishing communities. So we have to go to a lot of trouble to make sure that any effort-based system is right for the resources and for the fishing industry, and that if there are reductions to be made, for scientific reasons, and those scientific reasons are fully justified, that there should be adequate compensatory mechanisms in order to ensure that there are no victims of such a changeover. But I am not fundamentally opposed to effort limitation; I just want it to reflect truly what the fishing community is doing at the time the changeover takes place. Q84 Mr Lazarowicz: You also said a few minutes ago that you want to see regulations with which the industry was involved in the development. Does that not also give strength for another of the arguments in the SU report, that there needs to be a move towards a recovery of management costs peripherally from the industry? How would you react to that? Are there any particular aspects of management costs that you feel might be more appropriate than others? Mr Portus: I find it interesting, this business about recovery of management costs. The industry certainly did not ask the Department to spend the millions that it does spend every year on the imposition of the Common Fisheries Policy and I have to say that the costs are out of all proportion to the benefits that the industry gets from it. All we seem to get is bigger and bigger sticks with which to beat the industry and certainly no pats on the back or benefits from it. The industry is also taxpayers, so we are contributing to our own costs of enforcement because it is taxpayers' money that is being used. Furthermore, as Producer Organisations we are the tool of the Department which, in order to manage the fish quotas - for which we get no payment whatsoever - we are paid by the industry for their benefit, and yet we are asked year in year out to do more and more of the tasks that the Department did before Sectoral Quota Management came on the scene. So largely the costs of managing the fish quotas are already borne by the industry and any additional costs that are imposed by the State, in the creation of their aerial surveillance for instance, their naval presence, et cetera, et cetera, they are, I believe, Community requirements, for which a great deal of money is also drawn down from the Community to the Department in order to pay for those costs, and I think overall the taxpayer has not got a great burden to shoulder. I certainly do not think that it should be handed down to the industry. Q85 Mr Lazarowicz: So the taxpayer should pay for additional costs, as you put it? Mr Portus: We are forever being told that fish is a national resource and therefore the management of that fish should be a national requirement. Q86 Chairman: I notice you did not bring in the argument of cannot afford to pay it anyway. Mr Portus: Certainly not, Chairman! Q87 Ms Atherton: Fishing is often the lead item in the West Country, as you and I well know, but today it is the national lead and there is a Royal Commission report, which is very critical of commercial fishing. There have been a number of criticisms of commercial fishing; do you think they are justified? Mr Portus: I attended the launch of the Royal Commission this morning and I have looked at the summary of their recommendations. Indeed, the fishing industry comes in for quite a battering by that Commission, and indeed the industry has been bashed quite heavily by a number of reports that have been published in the last couple of years. I think the industry does not deserve the battering it is getting, by any means. Hundreds of fishing boats and, indeed, thousand of jobs have already been laid waste to over the last ten years, through decommissioning schemes and other mechanisms, in the UK and in other Member States for that matter, and there is a lot less activity out there on the seas than there was. Activity grew quite naturally in the 70s in particular because fishing is an economic activity and there was money to be had, and that is why people invested in fishing boats. There has been a trend, a reversal of the support that the industry used to have. The whitefish authority that became a sea fish industry authority used to pay out grants for the replacement of fishing boats. They spent lots of money on the development of fishing technology in order to make fishermen more efficient at catching fish, and now we are supposed to take the blame for all of that. I think it is a shame that the Royal Commission has come up with some quite extraordinary suggestions of 30 per cent closures of all fishing grounds in UK and community waters, especially when the industry has taken such a hammering in the last 18 months and so many of the boats have already left. Q88 Ms Atherton: But it is partly because of the concerns expressed today and previous concerns that you have discussed over the last two years that the Strategy Unit came up with the Strategic Environmental Assessment and the Environmental Impact Assessments. What are your judgments about those proposals? Mr Portus: The Strategy Unit, the Royal Commission, other groups are rehashing what the Community Green Paper came up with in 2001/2002, and it is the intention of the CFP, as we are now in, to have ecosystem based management, for environmental concerns to be uppermost in people's minds when regulations are brought forward, and that also fishery science is looked at in precautionary terms. All of that is old news and the industry has moved on in these two years in response to those changes, and I do not think it helps to keep on coming up with the same messages in terms of the need to look after the environment, because I do believe the fishing industry has responded and is responding. For instance, in the southwest we have the Invest in Fish southwest project. It is a very important project; it has the industry at its core, it has all sorts of other stake holding groups, not just the environmentalists - the restaurateurs, the multiples, the scientists, the administrators are all there at the table seeking ways to better manage the fish resources in those West Country waters - and I think they will come up with solutions that will go along in parallel with the demands of the Royal Commission, of the Strategy Unit, of all these other bodies. Q89 Ms Atherton: I think the jury is out on that one. I accept that it is very good what is going on in the West Country, but I still think that the SEAs may well be coming in. Say they are, how should they be done - by area, by fishery and by whom? Mr Portus: I do not think it really matters what the area or region is, I think it is the fisheries that are specific and I think the industry needs to be at the core of any of those assessments. The industry is out there on a day-to-day basis exploiting these fisheries and exploring new ones, where they can, and they have a huge wealth of knowledge, far more than the scientific community can ever gather within the budgets available to them. So I think it is for these environmental assessments to be done in collaboration with the fishing industry. Q90 Ms Atherton: Another area that is proposed is Marine Protected Areas, and of course we have the Lundy Island experiment, which has been quite successful, but do you think that in other areas it would be helpful? Will it help stock regeneration? Mr Portus: We heard a lot this morning about Lundy Island and it seems to be a beacon of hope and many people have latched on to it as being the way to go for the future. I am not saying that I disagree with that; I believe that MPAs or closed areas do have a place in the toolbox of fisheries' management. Indeed, it has been proposed by the southwest fishing industry that there should be closed areas in the Celtic Sea in order to help in the regeneration of cod stocks in that area. My organisation has assisted in the creation of two areas that, and whilst they are not totally closed, they are nevertheless restricted to static gear, off the South Devon Coast, in the Lyme Bay reefs area - we have done that in association with the Devon Wildlife Trust. Indeed, there are other examples. So, as I say, in the toolbox they have their place, but they have to be brought in with the collaboration of the fishing industry, not just collaboration but also overwhelming support at the end of the day, otherwise they will not work. If you are going to close an area and you have done so without getting industry support then you can expect the industry to start going back in there and poaching, and obviously if you have established a closed area you want it to be closed. Q91 Ms Atherton: There are some fishery dependent communities; do you think there is a threat to them from MPAs? Mr Portus: Very definitely. If you have MPAs established in a local fishery on the doorstep of a fishing community which has, up to that moment, relied upon that area for their livelihood, and you suddenly close it, then of course you are going to get the backlash from that fishing community. Q92 Ms Atherton: But it is an equation, is it not, because long-term if they do not close it then they will also suffer? Mr Portus: The very first thing you have to do when considering MPAs is to do a full scientific evaluation of what is in that area that you wish either to protect or regenerate, because certainly what we must not have in a commercial and economic activity is areas simply being closed for the sake of it, with no economic benefit on the other side of the equation. The industry has to be persuaded that there are going to be long-term benefits and they have to be analysed and assessed and presented to the industry, and the industry has to accept the figures that are presented to them. I think we are a long way away from establishing a network of MPAs, either in the southwest or indeed in the North Sea. Ms Atherton: Chairman, can I ask one question on a different subject? Chairman: Yes. Ms Atherton: This Committee has taken evidence on septation by-catch, as I am sure you are aware. Are you aware of the suggestions that the 12-mile exclusion is being breached off Devon and Cornwall at the moment by pair trawlers? I crave your indulgence. Q93 Chairman: It is an indulgence; let me have a brief answer. Mr Portus: I read the Western Morning News every morning on which it is published and I see the pictures that are published in it, and I have heard from fishermen who are in my organisation who have told me that fishing vessels are going inside the 12-mile limit. As I understand it, the law in terms of the bass pair trawling has not actually been brought into force yet and so anybody fishing within the 12-mile limit at the moment is doing so perfectly legally. I am on record as saying that at the time this law was brought in, or the Bill was brought in, that the Minister was really clutching at the only straws that he could because he was knocked back in Brussels from bringing forward an international cross-community regulation. Clearly the French have their opinions about pair trawling for bass and the economic wealth that it brings to them, and I do not think that that is arguable. If it were the case that pair trawling for bass was bad for bass then I think the Minister would have a much stronger case to argue in the Community to have it banned, but it seems that the bass population is standing up to this level of activity, so I am told, and in that respect dealing with septations, regrettably, is something that the Minister is unable to do. Chairman: Just satisfy my indulgence as well. These vessels are presumably French that Candy is complaining about? Q94 Ms Atherton: Scottish! Mr Portus: I will have to find a whole new area of prejudice now! Q95 Alan Simpson: Mr Portus, can you clarify one thing for me? There is an issue about the compatibility of what the industry is likely to say and what the Royal Commission has been saying. At the start of your evidence you talked about reservations about moving into Transferable Quotas and saying that that results in the industry being dominated by the big operators. But you used the phrase "the industry", and I do not know whether you are talking about an industry view that is now itself just dominated by the big operators. Is that how the industry is? Mr Portus: It certainly has been moving that way under FQAs because they have, de facto, become tradable and the industry has certainly also taken steps to aggregate and accumulate quotas in order for the individuals who have made those investments, for them to be legal when it comes to the landing of the fish that they are catching. That is what they have been forced into doing in order to comply with the regulations. So what we have is a much smaller industry - there is a mixture of decommissioning and consolidation of opportunities - and with a smaller industry you are bound to have fewer but larger corporations or individual owners in some instances around the entire UK. But it is one thing to talk about the owners of the vessels, whom I represent through a Producer Organisation and the fishermen themselves, who one might call "the industry", when those men are seldom actually consulted about anything because it is the owners who are represented by all the organisations. There are, obviously, Port Associations of fishermen who try to get their voice heard through sea fisheries' committees and that sort of thing, but it is very difficult to know when one is, as it were, listening to a voice at that level of the grass roots. Q96 Alan Simpson: I am just wondering whether, when the Royal Commission talk about sustainability, we are really pursuing a nonsense. If a middle ground was about smaller boats, more restricted types of tackle and restricted size of netting, whether already the character of the industry has said, "Push off" to that, they are now an industry dominated by industrial scale fishing interests that do not in any way offer the grounds that would be compatible with sustainability. Mr Portus: Interesting you say that because the Strategy Unit document has highlighted the pelagic sector; they have already made the transition to ITQs effectively. There are very few of them and they are responsible for very large quotas individually, and an enormous value, and it is as if they are being praised for doing that, and that therefore this is the way for the rest of the industry to go. I am not sure that white fisheries lend themselves to the same kind of management as the pelagic sector; in pelagics we are talking about hundreds of thousands of tons of quota of herrings and mackerels and horse mackerels and things like that, whereas with whitefish you are only talking in hundreds and handfuls of thousands of tons of quota, and also a lot more vessels involved. It is the relative values of the fish as well, with mackerel being a few hundred pounds a ton compared to Dover sole being £6,000, £7,000, £8,000 a ton. So the relative values are also important to recognise. This is why I do not think that we will ever gravitate to just a handful of whitefish boats in the entire UK sector, we are always going to have the size of boat that is suited to the fishing grounds of be it the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the East Coast, and they will be restricted in their numbers according to how much the quotas support. Chairman: Thank you very much, Jim. We have dealt with each other over fishing matters for more years than I can remember, and at least you have managed to stay more cheerful than most over that period. Thank you very much indeed.
Memorandum submitted by Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Examination of Witness
Witness: Dr Euan Dunn, Head of Marine Policy, examined. Chairman: Welcome, Dr Dunn; you are the Head of Marine Policy for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Can I thank you for the evidence, which is very clear, and since you took the recommendations topic by topic and gave us your reaction, which of course, inevitably as an environmentalist is different to the industry's reactions, it was very helpful to us. I am going to turn you over now to the birdman of Committee Room 15 to begin the questioning! Q97 Alan Simpson: You are very keen on supporting the concept of Strategic Environmental Assessments, but you use this intriguing phrase that talks about recognising that there are "challenges" in applying this to fisheries. Do you want to take us step by step through the challenges? Dr Dunn: I think the history of Strategic Environmental Assessment is that it really originated as a land-based system of assessment and it applies to plans and programmes, and there has been some question about whether it can be suitably applied to fisheries at all, but I think it is fairly explicit, if you read the detail of the European Directive, that it is applicable to fisheries and should be. I think the challenges are that it has never been done before. It was not given much of a billing in the Common Fisheries Policies Reform and neither did it make any requirement for Environmental Impact Assessment, except in aqua culture projects. So it has not had much policy development, far less operational application and that is basically why we are really starting with a blank canvass. But I think that in so far as the reformed Common Fisheries Policy asks for a progressive development of an ecosystem- based approach I think Strategic Environmental Assessment is absolutely at the core of that. I think it also fits very well with the growing thinking about spatial planning in the marine environment generally, because we have SEA in the offshore industry, oil and renewables and gas, and it seems very appropriate now that we should begin to think about SEA for fisheries in conjunction with SEA for other offshore activities so that we can actually plan how we use the marine environment in a coherent and logical way. So I think it is in its infancy, that it is a new science for fisheries, but I think it is absolutely essential and I think we have a mandate for it. Q98 Alan Simpson: How do we do that, though, because oil and gas do not move around in the same way? The consequences of the extractive industries in oil and gas can be assessed but you have a fixed point to work on. How do you see this applying in relation to fishing? Dr Dunn: The previous witness had a question of at what scale should we apply that, and I think that may be a starting point. In my view, it would be an appropriate scale to look at SEA at a level of regional SEAs, and in that case I would think that Strategic Environmental Assessment was a highly appropriate and suitable activity for the emerging Regional Advisory Councils to take on board; I think they would be the proper strategic overview to look at an SEA. So to answer your question more specifically, it would be informed by what kind of things would be attractable by an SEA process and one thing one could look at, for example, would be deep water fisheries, which came up this morning in the Royal Commission report. Deep water fisheries are a complex mix of bottom trawling, bottom gill nets and long lining, and it would have been very helpful if, at the start of deep water fishing many years ago, we had had an SEA to look at the cumulative effects of these different methods and how they could be mitigated and how they relate to environmental impacts; to look at the fishing methods in the round so that you could arrive at a balanced view of how deep water fishing should be conducted. That would then help you with Environmental Impact Assessment if you wanted to look at sub areas. So that is the kind of thing where it would be helpful. Q99 Alan Simpson: Is this the interface then that you see us being taken into, that it is to move from the question of the fishing quotas to fishing methods; that you just do not treat the extractive part of the marine economy from the sustainable part of the marine ecology? Dr Dunn: Quite so. And it has a fairly wide application. You could use an SEA to look at the impacts of closing an area of the sea which has hitherto been open for fishing or vice versa, of opening an area which had previously been closed; that is also the sort of thing you could apply an SEA to. Q100 Alan Simpson: You mentioned this Royal Commission report, and just as a backcloth to that, in terms of SEAs, do you feel that we are already at the point where that sense of closure has to be a starting point, a presumption in at least part of the seas around the UK that the environmental damage is already on a scale that requires complete closure of parts of the sea? Dr Dunn: I think the starting point for this discussion is that it is not an option for us, it is actually an obligation that the UK has already signed up to the OSPAR Convention and also the Johannesburg Agreement, 2002, both of which require us to set up in the North East Atlantic and globally respectively a network of Marine Protected Areas. In the case of OSPAR this is to be achieved by 2010 and for the Johannesburg Agreement it is 2012. This is not something that has parachuted in from nowhere; there is a big political context to this, both in the North East Atlantic as a region and globally, and a lot of people have put a lot of thought into this. I think it is time to start thinking about how we actually implement this and I think we should start it on an experimental trial basis because unless we do we will forever have this debate. We can get a great deal of information from some of the precedents. It is often argued against Marine Protected Areas that their track record is very much in the tropical seas, the barrier reef and the coral areas, to protect sedentary species in coral reefs, but the St George's Bank closure is a very, very helpful precedent in the northern temperate waters. The St George's Bank closure is now ten years' old, it covers 17,000 square kilometres embracing four closed areas. The fishermen themselves, very much in a Regional Advisory Council sort of way, have been very much the instrument of their own management decisions. They have voluntarily increased mesh sizes, accepted bigger Minimum Landing Sizes, reduced effort, and they have agreed the parameters for the closed areas and they are seeing benefits, not only in scallops but also in some of the ground fish species, which some people argue are likely to be more migratory and therefore less likely to benefit from a closed area approach. I think that we would be silly to dismiss this as just a symptom of wildly thrashing around for what we should do next. There is a serious set of scientific facts out there which can help us to inform us how we might add this, as Jim Portus said, into the "toolkit of management". It is not a silver bullet, it is not a panacea, but neither is it a red herring; it is a serious and useful tool in the toolkit and deserves close study. Q101 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. Q102 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 Arctic 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. Q103 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. Q104 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. Q105 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. Q106 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. Q107 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. Q108 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 Directive; 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. Q109 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? Q110 Chairman: To promote aqua-culture. Dr Dunn: To promote aqua-culture? Q111 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. Q112 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. Q113 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. Q114 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. Q115 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. Q116 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. Q117 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 per cent. 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‑‑‑ Q118 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‑‑‑ Q119 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. Q120 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. Q121 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. Q122 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.
Witness: Mr Alan McCulla, Chief Executive, Anglo-North Irish Fish Producers Organisation, examined. Chairman: Welcome Mr McCulla. I should explain for the record, you are the Chief Executive of the Anglo‑North Irish Fish Producers Organisation. We are grateful for your evidence. I was particularly interested in the conference you held at Kilkeel at the end of last year which I thought brought an interesting perspective to this whole argument particularly the evidence from Iceland and the evidence from the Faroes. It made me think we should look at similar instances here. We are grateful to you for that. I think it was a splendid initiative. I am going to ask David Burnside to begin the questioning. Q123 David Burnside: Alan, your organisation seems slightly less emotional and fanatically anti or pro withdrawal from the Common Fishery Policy than some others. I am trying to lead you into this answer! Is it because we have had very considerable success in the Irish Sea in recent years in conservation of stocks across various whitefish and the prawn and various species? Do you want to lead on from that? Mr McCulla: I think, Mr Burnside, the first thing I would say to that is that I am as fanatical and anti EU and anti CFP as the next person, but at the same time I am slightly more pragmatic about it, and that is based on previous experience over the past few years in particular with what was christened "the Cod Recovery Plan" in the Irish Sea. The Irish Sea was the first area in northern European waters to be subject to a stock recovery plan, in this instance for cod, and when the temporary closed areas were introduced from 14 February 2000 the industry in Northern Ireland lobbied the then devolved government to assist us with some transitional aid, some tie up aid to assist the vessels that were directly affected by the closed areas. We lobbied our own executive, we lobbied the Government here in London and we lobbied the European Union. The European Union said to us that as far as they were concerned the regulations were in place that allow for the payment of transitional aid, so they gave the green light. The problem came in the UK, and it was the UK and it was the Northern Ireland Executive that refused to pay the transitional aid. So that is a very practical experience where the EU was offering help, but it was our own government that let us down. Q124 David Burnside: Just on that point - I raised it in the House during the debate last week - you were briefing members from Northern Ireland that the local department had raised the problem and had raised the wider question of the relationship between the different areas in the regional assemblies and these new advisory councils; but just on the specific problem at home, has the local department not had enough resources to help you in the research side in the Irish Sea? Mr McCulla: I think the relationships with the local department have definitely improved over the past two years. One very recent sign of that is the agreement that we have with the department that, after five years of cod recovery in the Irish Sea, it is now time for a proper full and transparent evaluation of all of the measures that have been employed there. Q125 David Burnside: Who finances that, the national department? Mr McCulla: This is the thing. The department based in Belfast is quite small. I think the total scientific staff, as we speak, amounts to two fishery scientists. So if we are going to do this full and transparent evaluation of a very important issue, a very important issue not only for the Irish Sea but for elsewhere, they need to have the proper resources, and I think there is agreement. I am not just saying it, but the departmental officials in Belfast agree that they do not have the resources, i.e. the man‑power there, to carry out that full evaluation. Q126 David Burnside: Are you happy with the Regional Advisory Councils and their role as understood at the present time? Mr McCulla: I am okay. We need to look at the history of RACs. RACs came about, I would suggest, because of industry lobbying and industry lobbying that was led by the industry in the UK. We want the power devolved back from Brussels to the regions, and in a review of the Common Fisheries Policy two years ago the Commission and the Council accepted that and we got RACs out of it. I am slightly cynical about RACs as well. They have been criticised because they are going to be a talking shop, they do not have any teeth, etcetera, etcetera, but to be honest with you, I am quite relieved that at this minute in time they will be purely advisory, and that relief is based on practical experience that we have had with the Cod Recovery Plan in the Irish Sea. Where we do bring a number of delegations from around Europe and sit them round the table, the evidence showed to us that they were all out to look after their own self interests. Therefore, in that respect, an RAC is quite proper just to have an advisory capacity until it proves its maturity, and then, I hope, when it proves its maturity over the next few years, that more management responsibility could be devolved to RACs. Q127 David Burnside: One further point, Chairman, just on our regional area to the south where most of our fishing is done, Kilkeel. Would you give us your overview? How more effective can the southern Irish fleet be because of the subsidies that they have been given in recent years to modernise the fleet against the slightly older vessels that we have in Kilkeel? Mr McCulla: Very much more effective, because, to be quite blunt about it, I do not see the Irish authorities doing anything. It is another interesting angle to take. Q128 David Burnside: They are still building. Mr McCulla: They are still building, but they are not doing anything to contribute to conservation, sustainable fisheries, etcetera. It is another interesting angle to take on the Common Fisheries Policy, because here we have the funds coming down from Europe and the UK priority and Northern Ireland priority was to use those funds to decommission what was an old and ageing fleet. Six miles down road from Kilkeel you had another government who decided to use exactly the same funding coming from Brussels to rebuild and modernise a modern fleet. So today you have a situation where in the last ten years the fleet in Kilkeel is about half the size it was. The fleet has an average age in Northern Ireland of 34 years, where just a few miles down the road in the Republic of Ireland the fleet size has increased in terms of kilowatts, in terms of tonnage and the age of the fleet has got younger. Q129 Chairman: Do you attribute any of the blame for the higher death and accident rate, which are common in your submissions, to the age of the fleet? Mr McCulla: I hesitate about bringing this issue up, not necessarily about the age of the fleet, but there certainly has been a trend over the past few years as a direct result of policies emanating from Brussels and also enforced by London, that our fishermen move out of larger fishing vessels, and what I call larger fishing vessels are vessels about 20 metres in length - they are still not big boats - but the guys that worked in that category of vessel have been encouraged, let us say, to move into smaller vessels, and with smaller vessels there is a direct correlation to increased accident rates; and the simple fact of the matter is that in the twelve and a half years that I have been employed with the Fish Producers Organisation in Kilkeel, for the first ten years there were zero deaths at sea as a result of accidents on boats. In the last two and a half years there have been five deaths as a result of boats capsizing, etcetera. Q130 Chairman: You are not enthusiastic about individual transferable quotas. Is that because you feel they would undermine the role of the PO? Mr McCulla: No, I do not see that they will undermine the role of the PO, because, as we heard earlier on, there are a number of POs within the UK that are operating solely on an ITQ basis. Our own organisation has three member vessels operating on an ITQ basis, and those are pelagic vessels, and I think the fear that we have is that they will start expanding the ITQ system to the bulk of the fleet and the fear is based on the following. Twenty‑five years ago there were over 100 UK based trawlers prosecuting the herring fishery in the Irish Sea. Today there are three vessels prosecuting the herring fishery in the Irish Sea. The reason for that reduction is a series of management changes that have been introduced including those areas, but more importantly and more fundamentally is the individual quota system which the industry has in many ways brought upon itself. So we have three individuals, I am glad to say from Northern Ireland in this case, that basically own 80 per cent of the UK's Irish Sea herring quota, and because they own it the chances for anyone else to try to diversify into that fishery are very remote. I am very fearful if that system is then imposed or brought in in the commercial sector where we have just about 130 over ten metre trawlers based in Northern Ireland that it will not be too many years until you see that fleet drastically shrink. Q131 Chairman: Would ring‑fenced community quotas be of any use in Northern Ireland? Mr McCulla: I believe that it would, and I think the producer organisations have taken the lead in this respect as well. Our own organisation has spent somewhere in the region of over £1 million now buying quota from Northern Irish vessels that have been decommissioned, but obviously with the smaller fleet, with less money coming into the organisation, the opportunities to fund that kind of community quota purchase scheme are becoming increasingly limited; and we are talking to the Government in Northern Ireland about a funded community quota scheme, a community quota scheme that would still involve the POs, because the producer organisations do manage to quote us, but it would also involve representatives from the communities. So we could foresee a pot of money being ring‑fenced within Northern Ireland that is managed by the producer organisations with the Department and, for example, the district councils, and then, as a group, they would go out and purchase quota from decommissioned vessels and attribute it to the two producer organisations that are based in Northern Ireland to allow existing fishermen to become more sustainable and also to have the mandate to help encourage new efforts into the industry as well. Q132 Mr Lazarowicz: As you will know, the Strategy Unit Report recommends a number of measures to improve information and compliance: a high‑transparency system of tracing catches and landings and various other measures of a greater or lesser technical complexity to achieve that objective. What is your view on such proposals and do you think they have a role to play in addressing this issue? Mr McCulla: I will answer the question, if I can, with a quotation from another report that I have in front of me. It is just a short one in this case. I quote: "It is probable that the value of byelaws or fishery regulations cannot be fairly judged by statements of increased or decreased takes alone, as the question arises: what would be the state of the fisheries if at the present time there been no byelaws? For instance, it seems reasonable to surmise with regard to the Lancashire and western sea fisheries district that in these days of ever‑increasing catching path steam fishing vessels and other trawlers, had it not been for the byelaws, nursery and grounds lying near the coast would have been swept clean again and again until they were practically fished out not only to the detriment of these grounds themselves about also, as we have shown, of the grounds lying further seawards." You may ask a question like what is the relevance of me reading that quotation today. The relevance is that it came from a report that was written in 1902. What has changed? 102 years later over the past‑‑‑ Q133 David Burnside: Obviously increased bureaucracy from the Government! It never changes. Mr McCulla: Over the last two weeks local fishermen throughout the UK have received at least four letters from fisheries departments. The first one, dated 23 November, was updating fishermen about the new monitoring of fishing efforts in western waters, the second one that they then received was the new controls over landing into the UK which is a designated port regulation, the third one that they received dated 22 November was changes to the EU Days at Sea Scheme Annexe 5 of Council Regulation, etcetera, etcetera, and then, a couple of days later, quite literally, we received the proposal for the new Annexe 5 for 2005. The point that I am trying to make is that it is totally impossible for fishermen or their representatives to advise them as to how to be compliant when we have this deluge of paperwork hitting the decks practically every day of the week. Q134 David Burnside: Is that increase in costs not drawn directly parallel to the reduction in cost from HMG of the lack of naval protection of fishery vessels throughout the Northern Ireland coast? We have no vessels there whatsoever? Mr McCulla: I know that they closed the naval base in Belfast just over a year ago, and the permanent protection now comes from the Clyder, but, saying that, we have, compared with ten years ago, 40 per cent fewer fishing vessels based in the province, yet we have more fishery inspectors, we have more resources employed with regard to enforcement, we have more technology, we have satellite tracking systems and more money has been spent on this smaller industry and more regulations are coming in all the time. Q135 Mr Lazarowicz: The logic then presumably is we go for the marine protected areas and the central part of the fisheries, effort‑based system. What do we do if we do not want a complex system? Mr McCulla: I think very simply you speak to the fishermen. Certainly the fishermen I represent, I believe, have shown their maturity over the past few years, with the onset of the Cod Recovery Plan in the Irish Sea in the year 2000, especially fishermen belonging to our own organisation, they came forward with a whole raft of proposals including no-take zones and other technical measures that were designed as a cod recovery package. A lot of those measures were adopted, but before they were adopted, before they were imposed, we asked the Commission and we asked our own government to trial them to see if they would make a difference. Unfortunately, both the EU and our own Government refused to do that, and it will only be in 2005, as a result of an initiative that our own organisation has taken in partnership with government fishery scientists, that we will at last try those measures out, but the fact is and I think the lesson is that when you sit down, you talk to the fishermen and you take them seriously, then they will come along in the process: because they are the last people at the end of the day that want to create a situation where the seas are fished out. They more than anyone want sustainable fishing. Q136 Chairman: I think we can all agree with that. I notice in the report of the conference, which was fascinating, it seems to have started out as a kind of lynching party for the ICES scientists, who did not in fact come along to be lynched. Has there been any rapprochement between the Northern Ireland industry and the scientists since then? Did it lead anywhere? Mr McCulla: I think we need to clarify, Chairman, because, yes, there was a feeling at that time that the ICES scientists based on eloquence were going to be lynched, and that was the result of an unfortunate incident. Q137 Chairman: So what. They did not come. Mr McCulla: It was as a result of an unfortunate incident at Kilkeel where at the beginning of 2003 the news had just broken for a fourth year that there was going to be no tie‑up aid or transitional aid, that closures were going to be repeated, effort control, more regulations there was no carrot at the end of the day. Unfortunately, when the scientific observers visited the port they were politely asked to leave. That is not something that I am going to condone, but at the same time I am concerned that nobody from ICES or the Commission actually approached myself as the fishermen's representative or the fishermen and asked them why that action was taken. It was taken out of sheer frustration. Moving on to your question, since May of this year the scientists are back in the markets again but they are back under a new mechanism, let's say, whereby when they visit the market they are accompanied by fishermen or their representatives, and all of the information that the scientists are gathering on the quayside is fed back to the fishermen and the fishermen are asked to comment on it. I think the latest one that we embarked on was a trip to the Faroe Islands in the last week in October, and one of the scientists from Belfast accompanied us on that trip, and in the New Year it will be a first for anywhere in the UK when, in partnership with a fishery scientist, we will be opening a small fisheries research laboratory at the quayside in Kilkeel. Q138 Chairman: So there has been some closer work. Mr McCulla: A lot. Q139 Chairman: You are happy with that? Mr McCulla: Maybe as the start of my report may have suggested, we are certainly out to shift the fishery scientists. We cannot do without them. The fishing industry cannot do without them. As fishermen we do not pretend that we know it all, and we would like to think that the fishery scientists will also admit they do not know it all; so it is essential that we work together; and I think the very nature of the trip to the Faroe Islands, where we had the fishery scientists gathered with the fishermen talking to the Faroese fishing scientists and learning from their experiences, proves that we are moving in the right way. David Burnside: It is an Ulster characteristic when conflict precedes consensus! Q140 Chairman: Yes, we noticed that happening this week. What did you learn in the Faroes ‑ this is my last question ‑ because they have, in fact, defied the ICES's recommendation most over the past few years. If ICES have recommended a 25 per cent cut they have cut by 1 per cent or 2 per cent or they have not cut at all. What did you learn from that? Mr McCulla: It was quite amazing, Chairman. You are quite right, in the Faroes the Government chose to ignore the ICES's advice and indeed the advice of their own ICES fisheries scientist, and one would have thought that after ignoring that advice year after year the fishery would have collapsed, but for some reason the fishery has increased. In saying that the fishermen themselves said that a stage was going to come that the fishery would start a downward curve, and that downward curve seems to have begun this year. One very interesting conversation that we had with a gentleman who was the biggest trawler over in the Faroe Islands, he was the previous Faroese Fisheries Minister, and this particular gentleman owned eight trawlers and he was able to produce for us the dabber which detailed every fish that those eight trawlers had landed for the past 25 years, and one of the things that happened during the 25 years was that in 1993 the cod fishery around the Faroe Islands collapsed and when it collapsed the fishery scientists suggested that this is was as a result of over‑fishing. First of all the Faroese introduced a quota management regime which was a complete failure and was scrapped within about 18 months. They then produced their effort control regime, which has been in place ever since. The interesting thing about it was that when we spoke to the Chief Fishery Scientist in the Faroes he admitted that in 1993, yes, he had blamed over‑fishing for the collapse of the cod stock, but, ten years later, they have now concluded it was not over‑fishing, it was environmental change, it was a climate change, the currents around the Faroes had fluctuated and carried the spawn off‑shore. So they admitted that, and it was good to see a scientist admitting that he could get it wrong. Chairman: Thank you very much. We are grateful to you for coming because you have widened our dimensions and actually brought us an outside point of view from the Faroes and Iceland and other alternative methods of science and catching control in a very useful way. Thank you very much indeed.
|