Examination of Witness (Questions 170-179)
Mr Barrie Deas
19 MARCH 2008
Q170 Chairman: Welcome and thank
you first of all for the written evidence but also for finding
time to come and talk to us and help us with our inquiry. I have
to go through two formal things. First of all this is a formal
evidence session so a transcript will be taken; you will get a
copy of that and have an opportunity to make any corrections and
iron out any issues. The other thing is that these hearings are
all webcast so what we are saying here is going into stellar space
and somebody might pick it up somewhere, most likely on the lost
planet. Let us proceed, would you like to start by making a general
statement and then we can go into a question and answer session,
or do you want to go straight into the Q&A?
Mr Deas: Only to introduce myself as Barrie
Deas, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Fishermen's
Organisations, which is the representative body for fishermen
in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. That is my day job—that
is who pays my salary; I am also Vice-President of Europeche,
the European association of fishermen's organisations, and the
Chairman of the demersal working group of the North Sea RAC and
I am on the executive committee of the North West Waters RAC and
the External Waters RAC.
Q171 Chairman: That is pretty impressive;
thank you very much. I wonder if I could start by really asking
you what you see as the objectives or should be the objectives
of the Common Fisheries Policy, how successful is it in achieving
those objectives and what are the reforms that you would like
to see—fairly simple?
Mr Deas: The objectives—I have to start
with sustainability of stocks because without that you do not
have anything else. There are certain realities that are imposed
on our fisheries, by their nature; these are some of the most
complex fisheries in the world: multi-gear, multi-species, multi-jurisdiction
and so the reality is that we have shared stocks and we therefore
need institutional arrangements to manage those shared stocks.
Sustainability and a living for fishermen and those who depend
on fish landings in my view, (perhaps a simplistic view) should
be the objectives. The reforms in 2002 were very much a mixed
bag; there were some advantages and some movements forward, particularly
in relation to the establishment of regional advisory councils,
and there were other items, particularly the road which the Commission
have gone down in terms of stock recovery plans that have not
been quite so palatable. The central failing of the Common Fisheries
Policy was diagnosed some time ago: it is over-centralised, it
is almost an Eastern European (pre-the Wall) set of institutions.
Q172 Chairman: A bit like the CAP
then really.
Mr Deas: That is right. It is over-centralised
and the DG Fisheries does a good job in extremely difficult circumstances,
it is not a huge number of people and yet, as somebody has pointed
out, they have got responsibility for fisheries over 40 degrees
of latitude and very different kinds of fisheries. That has influenced
their choice of instrument, particularly for example effort control—TAC's
and quotas and effort control. TACs and quotas are difficult to
get away from because you need to share the cake somehow in this
complicated set-up, so they are a given unless you can identify
some alternative way of sharing the cake. Effort control has been
chosen because it is a way in which Brussels can reach out and
theoretically control what happens at sea by limiting the amount
of time. I happen to have fairly strong views that that is not
what happens but those are some opening and very broad remarks
that I would like to make about the CFP.
Q173 Chairman: Can we just press
you on what you said about effort control, saying that that is
not what happens. What do you mean by that?
Mr Deas: Effort control is a restriction on
the time that a vessel can go to sea, it does not influence what
the vessel does when it is at sea. There are a number of responses
that vessels can make in order to maintain their earnings when
they are pushed for time at sea. They can obtain additional days,
buy days, and that is what happens, so that increases the cost
to the industry, but an alternative might be to high-grade—in
other words the fish that you do catch you keep the highest value
ones so it is an encouragement to discard—or you could limit
the geographical range of where you fish. In other words you could
be fishing in juvenile inshore stocks rather than going a bit
further afield, so there are 101 ways in which fishermen can and
will react to restrictions on time at sea if they really bite,
in order to make their fishing operations more efficient. That
could be technical gear, discarding, where they fish, crewing,
a whole range, so my argument is that effort control provides
an incentive to increase the intensity of fishing when you are
at sea and I think that is entirely counter-productive. Iceland
had an effort control system for its small boat fleet and they
got down to allocations of 80 days a year before abandoning it
because they could see that the vessels were, what they call "capital
stuffing"—putting in bigger engines so that their steaming
time to the grounds was reduced etc but they abandoned it. The
Norwegians scoff at effort control because they see it as a substitute
for a structural regime that addresses the issue of capacity and,
as I say, the European Commission have chosen effort control because
from their point of view it exerts control at a distance.
Q174 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
You have already stated that it is too big and the European Commission
cannot control it all; therefore you suggest that governance should
be moved down the line a bit to the fish industry, to the regional
advisory councils and to Member States. We are a bit dubious about
the efficacy of this and all those levels of governance at a lower
level; will they actually impose what is needed for conservation
of the fishing stocks? I was wondering whether you could explain
really how you see it actually working in practice.
Mr Deas: The Commission itself is thinking along
these lines; it is struggling and there is a debate within the
Commission about how far to go down these routes. I attended a
meeting organised by ICES in Copenhagen a few weeks ago; its title
was "Reversing the burden of proof in fisheries" and
as I understand it the idea would be that the Commission and Member
States would set principles and standards and the RACs would be
involved at that level as well to find what would be appropriate
principles and standards for fisheries, but after that it would
be down to industry. There would be a transfer of responsibility
to the industry, so instead of having this whole panoply of highly
prescriptive rules that are difficult to enforce, difficult to
understand—and that is not just the industry, the enforcement
side as well find it difficult and highly complex (and leaving
aside just for a second what we mean by the industry, at what
sort of level) industry groups would submit plans for, say, three
to five years, a three to five-year operational plan in which
it would specify how it would fish sustainably in line with these
principles and standards that have been set. That process would
be audited, so the Commission's role would change from setting
the standards, to auditing the process, auditing the paperwork
and ensuring that the plans, which might include technical measures
or any other include the instruments that were chosen, how they
would meet environmental standards and the whole panoply. And
the scientists would audit those plans. To me, from an industry
point of view, there are threats and opportunities in all of that,
and the idea of responsibility and a less prescriptive system
is very attractive, but the big question is who goes to jail when
it all goes wrong.
Q175 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
That is what I was going to ask you about enforcement; how do
you enforce this and how do you ensure that the fishermen do not
take advantage of the fact, because presumably the fishermen have
a majority on the regional advisory councils. Who is to say that
in every area they are going to behave responsibly?
Mr Deas: I did park the issue of what we are
talking about when we say industry. The RACs certainly have a
role in helping to define the standards and principles, but it
may be that industry groups and voluntary groups of owners—that
might be national, it might be international, it may be down to
individual vessel level, that is all for discussion, but the principle
of moving in that direction is a sound one. We certainly have
a lot of work to do on the practicalities but we are not dealing
with ideals here, we are talking about looking at a system that
we have now that has had a considerable amount of time to work,
and whether we continue with highly prescriptive rules imposed
from above or whether we move to something that has a lot more
flexibility but transfers a considerable amount of responsibility
and authority to the industry.
Q176 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Can the RACs fulfil this role as they develop?
Mr Deas: I do not know the answer to that question.
RACs have a role, for example, in developing long-term management
plans which would really feed into the standards rather than the
lower level; the lower level is really about demonstrating a group
of owners' commitment to a particular plan and following through
that plan. It has to be at a lower level than the RACs because
the RACs' strong points are the involvement of the industry but
also the involvement of other stakeholders, and they provide a
forum, but if you are going to have a system in which the industry
is taking responsibility then you could not have other stakeholders
involved in that.
Q177 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
In your plans scientists and conservationists would have no say,
it would entirely be the local fishermen who say what they should
catch. I do not think that sounds a very good idea.
Mr Deas: I do not think that is what I am saying
and bear in mind that scientists are not formally members of RACs
anyway; they are invited along and play a big role and we would
have liked to have had them as full members but that was not the
way it worked out. The scientists have a role in auditing the
process and in writing the plans before that and there needs to
be a realignment of the role. Whilst touching on scientists, at
the moment their role is largely restricted to pointing and saying
"You are getting too close to the cliff edge, you are getting
too close to the cliff edge." A much more constructive role
would be for scientists to provide options and say if you want
to get to something like maximum sustainable yield, or maximum
economic yield, here are some ways of getting there for discussion,
that is a much more productive role. That is what the scientists
that are currently involved in the RACs want. To answer your questions
more directly, the scientists are involved in helping to define
the plans and the auditing process and the Commission and the
various control authorities in the Member States, the European
Fisheries Control Agency, their central role would be the auditing
process.
Chairman: Let us move on to the economics of fisheries
management; Viscount Ullswater.
Q178 Viscount Ullswater: In your
evidence you have labelled TAC's as being a very blunt instrument,
and yet you have also said that any alternative system would need
to offer a similar distributive mechanism. You have just said
to My Lord Chairman that the effort control is one that has proved
to be non-viable and you gave evidence from Iceland and from Norway,
so if you are looking at more of an outcome system to deliver
sustainability and to maximise economic returns, how do you see
that being controlled and are there some management tools which
need to be devised or relaxed in order to make that happen?
Mr Deas: We are stuck with TACs and quotas because
I cannot see an alternative way of sharing the cake out. We can
dispense quite happily with effort control, particularly as across
Europe we are moving towards a situation where there is a much
higher degree of compliance. Effort control was introduced to
underpin TACs and quotas because there was large-scale black fish;
that era seems to have come to an end and therefore the fundamental
rationale for effort control is not there. The instruments are
long term management plans that would define where we want to
get to, but the more detailed instruments and measures under the
scenario that I described earlier would be for the industry to
define the detail, so that instead of saying what size holes should
be in your net you would say, as part of your plan, "I will
be using these kinds of gears that will deliver this level of
selectivity." If a group of fishermen want to use effort
control restrictions on their time at sea voluntarily, who am
I to say no to that; my problem with that is using it as a broad,
long-distance restriction. If we are thinking about 2012 and the
reform of the Common Fisheries Policy and what might replace the
current arrangements, those are the kinds of ideas that we need
to explore.
Q179 Viscount Ullswater: You have
to accept that TACs are there, the quota is there.
Mr Deas: Yes.
|
