Examination of Witness (Questions 680-682)
Mr Ian Hudghton MEP (SNP), Ms Elspeth Attwooll MEP
(Lib Dem), Mr Struan Stevenson MEP (Conservative) and Ms Catherine
Stihler
7 MAY 2008
Q680 Viscount Brookeborough: Really
it is about hardship to these communities. Have they got vast
unemployment there or have these people found other employment,
because after all in other industries there have been large redundancies,
whether it is farming or various other things, and the question
is, have those people found suitable employment, not necessarily
whether they are still farming sheep or shipbuilding?
Mr Stevenson: I would hope that they have been
able to find suitable employment but it is always difficult in
remote peripheral areas where fishing and farming are the mainstay.
We have tried to develop aquaculture as a way of taking some of
the displaced employment from the sea fishery but aquaculture
itself is befuddled with problems in Europe, mostly of our own
making. We had a conference the other day where the leading fish
farmer from Ireland was telling us that before they land their
fish his fish farmers have to deal with 400 different regulations,
emanating not only from DG Mare but also from DG ENVI, DG Sanco,
DG Trade. I repeated this information in a speech I made in Denmark
last week to fish farmers, and one of them in the question and
answer session said to me, "400 bits of red tape? We have
400 regulations to deal with just from our Environment Directorate,
never mind all the others you mentioned". He said, "There
are over 1,000 regulations". We are only 50% self-sufficient
in fisheries products in Europe. We still import 50% of what we
eat from outside the EU and yet we have the perfect environment,
the perfect coastal environment, the perfect technology, leading
the world, for aquaculture, but we are hamstringing our aquaculture
industry with regulations. It is not necessarily the case that
we are finding employment but after these problems occur it becomes
then a matter for the Member State to deal with the consequent
unemployment. They say that six people are displaced on shore
for every fishermen that loses his job at sea, and the consequences
can be quite significant, but who deals with that and where you
can find this information I do not know.
Ms Attwooll: There is definite hardship in some
of the remoter communities. I am not just talking about Scotland
but I was recently on a Fisheries Committee visit to Ireland,
and in those communities there is a particular problem. In some
ways people in the fishing industry are almost being forced to
become like Scottish crofters. Crofting is not the full-time occupation
but you have to do something else as well to survive, but people
do want to carry on in the fishing industry. Although I am a person
who is inclined to effort limitation rather than quotas as the
better system of management, I do have to say that it is understandable
that if you have effort limitation in terms of days at sea, if
you have a rise in fuel prices and then you get bad weather you
are put in a situation where you are really struggling to make
ends meet.
Ms Stihler: I would just like to mention the
Court of Auditors report. I do not think anybody has mentioned
that. That is why we have got great concern about the serious
weaknesses of control and enforcement.
Mr Hudghton: Just on that subject, since the
European Fisheries Control Agency issue was raised, I think it
should, for as long as we are muddling along with the CFP, be
an institution which polices the policemen and does not try to
do it all itself from Vigo, which would be impossible. We already
have, as has been highlighted, some differences not just in methods
but also in penalties and so on for enforcement and there is,
as indeed the Court of Auditors report has indicated, a case for
looking at how control and enforcement is (or rather is not) working.
The Court of Auditors report has resulted in the Commission agreeing
to bring forward a proposal on improving control and enforcement
and that is one of the things that the Commissioner was referring
to when he used the "root and branch" quote the other
day. The Commission sees this as a significant part of reform
of the CFP and I am not quite so sure that that is tackling the
real problem. It is tackling a problem that exists and for the
time being is the responsibility of the Commission to tackle,
but the real fundamental problem of the CFP is the structure of
decision-making, the cumbersome nature of it, the centralisation,
the lack of incentive and the lack of local input. One small improvement
last December which gives encouragement is that largely the argument
by the Scottish Government and industry persuaded the UK minister
and the Commission to support an element of a return to hands-on
management, allocation of days at sea, within Scotland in this
current year and also for the first time enabling Scotland to
use an element of carrot rather than just stick, which has been
one of the issues about enforcement to date. If you say to people
who think the law of the CFP is a complete failure then it follows
that they are not necessarily going to be terribly enthused about
compliance. We have done a lot in Scotland on a voluntary basis
to ensure compliance and to deal with many of the problems and
it is only right that that should be recognised in this way and
that we should not just be saying, "If you do bad things
you will be stopped from doing bad things"; we should also
be saying, "If you do good things then you should get some
recognition for that". One point for the record about this
famous Court of Auditors report is that it is based upon data
which were gathered in, it says, the six most important fishing
Member States, including the UK, but in the UK part it has in
brackets "England and Wales", so the data that were
used by the Court of Auditors in that report as far as the UK
is concerned were only from England and Wales. Who knows what
would have happened if Scotland had been included, but in Scotland,
as I have said, because of registration of buyers and sellers
and other things, there is a particular set of circumstances there
and the fact that some 70% of the UK's industry is in Scotland
makes me want to raise that point every time I have the opportunity,
and I am doing it again now. England and Wales are not the UK
and particularly they are not the UK as far as the fishing industry
is concerned, and if we are going to have from the Commission
proposals to improve control and enforcement in Scotland then
they ought to be based on the situation in Scotland and not on
a general perception or analysis EU-wide. That, just like management
control and enforcement, has to be directed to the situation that
exists in particular areas.
Chairman: Before I hand over to Lord Palmer, one
little observation is that there are, of course, those who claim
that the north west communities suffer dreadfully because of the
rapacious nature of the north east boats, but I would not dream
of making that claim.
Q681 Lord Palmer: I was really rather
shocked, Mr Stevenson, to hear you mention the seal destruction.
I was not aware of this until you mentioned it. Did you say that
it was ICES who said that seal destruction could not be taken
into consideration?
Mr Stevenson: No. ICES do not consider it. They
consider all sorts of other fish mortality levels—over-exploitation
and all the rest of it. They reluctantly even looked at the climate
change issue when we raised it in the committee but they will
not look at seals. It is the Commission themselves who give the
lead on this. The Commission are being somewhat disingenuous because
I recently was in Denmark and was shown by some fishermen leaflets
that the European Commission had printed where they were paying
for Norwegian seal hunters to train Swedish people how to hunt
seals, and this was being done at the Commission's expense but
being kept very quiet, and certainly it has never been trumpeted
over here. There would be a hell of a row. The Commission are
being somewhat two-faced on this issue, but when it comes to us
discussing seals as part of the depredation of the fish stocks
it is a no-go area. We are not allowed to do it.
Ms Stihler: Thanks for giving me a good written
question to put down to the Commission. I totally disagree with
Struan's perspective about how seals are the cause of our lack
of fish, and many of us in the committee find Struan's perspective
on this quite disagreeable, so I want that put on the record.
Struan is very interesting because he does a lot of animal welfare
stuff, so I do not know what the difference is between cats and
dogs and seals. Anyway, I think I would like that on the record.
Q682 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
I wondered what you felt about the idea of having a ban on discards
or, if there was not going to be a total ban, how we minimise
the discards because it is one of the more disgraceful aspects
of the Common Fisheries Policy?
Mr Stevenson: I am entirely in favour of a ban.
In fact, we were pressing with a series of amendments in the recent
Commission proposal for a total ban, because we are talking now
about a million tonnes of good, healthy fish being dumped into
the water every year, which is an improvement; it used to be two
million tonnes estimated a year. It is hard to tell because, of
course, the fishermen do not log what they are dumping. That in
itself is having a huge impact on the fish stocks, but also at
this time when we have a shortage of fish meal, which is a vital
ingredient for feeding salmon and trout and all the other fish
being reared in the aquaculture industry, and the price of fish
meal internationally has rocketed although it has slightly eased
recently from places like Chile and Peru, the fish processors
are saying, "We would be delighted to pay for any discards
that you insist on your fishermen bringing back to port. We are
prepared to pay at a level that does not encourage targeting of
these immature or over-quota species but a level that you could
set which might be not enough to encourage targeting but would
be too much to encourage continual dumping", say £50
a tonne for fish that otherwise would have been discarded, so
there is a potential way for dealing with these discards. The
industry are desperate to get their hands on them. It is healthy
fish, and we need not think that they are going to be brought
back and landed, which itself would be useful because the scientists
then would get a clear picture of what is being caught, the real
state of the fish stocks, but they will not necessarily then have
to be dumped in landfill; there is an outlet for them. The one
thing that we were insisting upon was that if you are going to
insist on an end to discarding you will have to fit a CCTV to
monitor it, to make sure that the fishermen are complying, and
this is what the Danish Government have now implemented on a trial
basis. They are also putting observers on board the boats that
they are trying this out on, so it is a belt and braces approach
in Denmark with CCTV and observers on board. It seems to me that
you would have to go to that length to ensure compliance.
Ms Attwooll: One of the reasons that I tend
towards effort limitation rather than quotas is that I do not
quite see how you can get rid of discards as long as you have
the quota system. Even if you land them they are essentially discards.
There is just a different way of discarding them and perhaps getting
some kind of economic value out of them. If you had an effort
limitation system you might still have some discarding because
of high grading, although if you get your effort limitation right,
and particularly with high fuel costs, I think this is going to
be less and less of a problem because fishers just will not be
able to afford to go through a high grading process. In addition
to that, whether you stick with the quota system or have effort
limitation, there is a lot that can be done by way of technical
measures. I was slightly shocked at a presentation that we had
on technical measures at the Fisheries Committee this week, where
they talked about the different types of nets and ways in which
discards could be prevented but there did not seem to be that
much agreement and perhaps not enough research yet on what the
best technical measures were. We had thought in Scotland that
the development of the square mesh panel was a step forward, and
I am sure it is, but we were told that there were other configurations
which were better than the square mesh panels. So much more needs
to be done by way of research into the best ways of preventing
fish being caught in the first place, and this applies not just
to fish but indeed to by-catches of various kinds as well, porpoises
and sea birds and so on. I really think that we need a great deal
of impetus in that direction. Also, I think the voluntary closure
of areas, as has been happening in Scotland, is a big step forward
and that ought to be emulated in other parts of the EU.
Ms Stihler: We now have the Schlitter report,
which is our report on discards, which was an own initiative report
we voted upon at the end of January. In an ideal world we would
love to move to an instant ban but the reality is much more complicated
and we started to investigate the subject. Struan's approach about
CCTV on every fishing vessel is a bit of a big brother approach
in my opinion and many in the committee did not support Struan's
approach to that. With regard to the practical aspects in terms
of the cost of dealing with landed discards, Struan has one opinion
about that. Other people have other things that they would like
to discuss on that, such as the cost of introducing more selective
gear, which we have talked about—I think there are something
like 11 different sets of gear that are used in the EU—and
the implications for total allowable catches and the quota regime
if discarding is banned, and the need to give fishermen an incentive
to fish in a more sustainable way. In the Schlitter report there
is also a clear indication that there is a difference in the causes
of discards from fishery to fishery. One approach is not enough.
You have to look at the individual fisheries. Perhaps having an
amnesty in discards is not going to be a solution because you
may create a market in discards instead of encouraging fishermen
to fish in a more sustainable way. Karl Schlitter is a Swedish
Green, so for a Swedish Green not to come out and say, "Have
a complete ban now", but, "Let us look at ways that
we can try and gradually get to that ban" was very interesting.
It was quite a shock that a Swedish Green came forward with that
approach, and I think he came forward with it because he wanted
to have as much consensus within the committee as possible. He
also suggested a range of pilot discard projects with a geographical
range, and I definitely supported that approach, to look at what
worked where and how effective those projects would be, so we
now have to make sure that what we try to get through the Schlitter
report is implemented in practice.
Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed.
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