Examination of Witness (Questions 780-799)
Mr Robin Rosenkranz
8 MAY 2008
Q780 Chairman: They seem to be up
to managing coal mines and things like that much more easily than
they do fishing.
Mr Rosenkranz: I fully agree. We cannot blame
the politicians completely. We also have to look at the history.
We started building up the European fleet after the Second World
War and we have done it up until now. In the eighties and nineties
we realised that the stock could collapse, which was news to us
then. We could not understand that the stocks could collapse,
so after building up the fleet with taxpayers' money for 30, 40,
50 years, suddenly we had to change the policy and cut it down
to what it was 20, 30, 40 years before. It is quite difficult
for politicians if they come from coastal regions which have large
fishing interests. Nevertheless, I think this will happen in one
way or another, either with bankruptcies or more fish stock collapsing,
but then it will be more of a market issue where a lot of fishing
vessels will be available to market because the fishermen has
gone bankrupt, or we can do it by helping partly with funds but
also partly with the market.
Q781 Earl of Arran: As you are aware,
the Court of Auditors were scathing in the report they produced
last October in relation to control and enforcement. What is your
view about this, about the new regulation? Do you support some
form of harmonisation and minimum penalties? Do you give added
strength to the Fisheries Protection Control Agency? What do you
think about this?
Mr Rosenkranz: In spite of us being very conservationist
and finding ways to improve fishing control and so on, we do have
a problem on having harmonised rules and having penalty rules
decided by the European Community. It is a constitutional difficulty
for Sweden as well. What we have tried to do is at a national
level increase the penalty levels and increase also the administrative
sanctions, because we have a penal system an administrative sanction
system. It has to be painful to commit a crime in fishery but
we have not come to the stage where we can allow the Community
to regulate on penal levels; we are not there yet in Sweden. I
wish we were but we are not. When it comes to the new control
reform, yes we are for simplification. We are also for what you
might call risk-based assessment. Control is expensive and with
the amount of money we have we have to make sure that we get the
best result from it. That means that we are not in favour of having
all these forms. I am perhaps being a bit negative but, just to
make my point, we do not want the control agencies having to spend
hours and hours filling in forms. We want them to find the ones
who are breaking the law and do that as efficiently as possible,
so we do not want a huge administrative system. We want them to
be able to say, "There is the problem; let us go for it",
so we want simplification and flexibility in order to make control
as inexpensive and as efficient as possible.
Q782 Earl of Arran: Having said that,
would you be confident that within three, four or five years'
time the Court of Auditors would not bring in the same critical
and scathing report?
Mr Rosenkranz: No. We still need a couple more
parameters to get that working, and that is a social contract
with the fishermen. We can speak of all the control policies we
want, we can have all the controllers we want on the boats, but
this has no effect compared to if we get social control by the
fishermen themselves. This is what we see in Sweden now in cod
fishing because we have had a lot of difficulty with illegal fishing
in the Baltic Sea. Now, speaking with fishermen, they check each
other, they control each other, and that is so much more efficient.
If we can create regulations and rules that are accepted by the
fishermen and used by them because they feel they should abide
by the rules this would be worth so much more than all the control
regulations we can come up with, but we need this in combination
so you cannot look at it separately.
Q783 Viscount Ullswater: Can I just
ask about illegal fishing? What form does it take with your fleet,
for instance? Is it landing in unauthorised places?
Mr Rosenkranz: I think it is mainly misreporting.
Let us say they catch 200 kilos; they only report 170 or 180.
As far as I know we do not have black markets where they have
landings at night and they do not have trucks at night transporting
to Holland or Germany or wherever[2].
That is what we saw up until recently in Poland, where they had
organised black fishing. They were fishing at night where they
knew there were not control agents out and they landed at night.
It was very organised. So far we have not seen this going on in
Sweden. I hope we won't in either and I think it has diminished
in Poland as well.
Q784 Viscount Ullswater: It is as
important then to exercise control on the land, to inspect the
markets, to see the fish landed, to weigh it or whatever, as it
is on the sea?
Mr Rosenkranz: It is less expensive to do it
on land and it is also less expensive using what the Commission
calls cross-checking, so not only at landing but they go to the
next level, to the distributor, so by using sales notes, et cetera,
this can be done in an office from nine to five, seeing, "There
are 500 kilos here but there is only registered 100 kilos there.
What happened?". That is a very efficient way of doing it
and I think the Commission is working on that and we are open
to using that method as well because controlling at sea is very
expensive and sometimes quite difficult.
Q785 Chairman: You mentioned what
I suppose is a culture of compliance now in the industry. What
brought that about, do you think?
Mr Rosenkranz: One of the reasons was that last
year—and I am speaking mainly of Sweden now; I cannot extrapolate
to other Member States—we had this statistical measurement
where we registered the fishermen, what they landed when they
knew there was a controller at the port and how much they landed
when they knew that there was no controller. There was a difference.
When having a controller waiting at harbour they always reported
much more than when they knew there was no controller at harbour,
so there was a difference there and, taking all the landings together,
you had quite a large statistical number showing that the difference
between controlled landings and uncontrolled landings was about
20%. Extrapolating this to the whole fleet, we assumed that the
unreported landings were about 20%. In the end it turned out to
be 9 or 10%, using the whole fleet and the whole cod stock. What
we did, based on these statistical results, was that when we had
90% left of a quota we stopped it and said, "We have exhausted
our annual quota, because we have also included illegal landings".
The message to the fishermen was, "You cannot get away. We
will do this", so they knew that reporting when there was
no controller at landing and recording less, which is what they
did, did not help because if you have 1,000 or 2,000 landings
you get a statistical trend. Stopping our fishery gave the very
clear message, "Do not fish illegally because we will catch
you anyway", and so far they have not tried suing us in court
because we think we have enough statistical evidence showing it.
We cannot prosecute anyone, but we are collectively penalising
them by diminishing the quota.
Q786 Viscount Brookeborough: And
has it now evened out?
Mr Rosenkranz: We will soon find out because
we are taking new measurements, but this has made very good results
in Poland, for instance, because they did the same thing. What
they did, which is very important to say, is that they included
the overfishing in their statistics, so instead of fishing 30%
of the quota, they claimed, "We have fished 60% because we
have also included illegal landings", and these are signals
which I think are extremely powerful and important for fishermen.
There is, of course, a risk that they will stop reporting altogether
and use the black landings at night because those do not exist
in the statistics and then we have to find other means of approaching
that, but we are trying to reach the fishermen that are in the
grey zone. With the ones in the black zone it is much more difficult
but with the ones in the grey zone it is a bit easier to get them
into the white zone if they know that it is difficult to cheat.
Q787 Earl of Arran: Are they criminal
prosecutions or civil prosecutions?
Mr Rosenkranz: I am not sure about the difference.
Q788 Earl of Arran: When you do prosecute
a fishermen for breaking the law, is it a criminal offence or
a civil offence?
Mr Rosenkranz: It could be two kinds. We have
criminasl prosecutions and administrative sanctions which could
be applied.
Q789 Earl of Arran: It depends what
he has done?
Mr Rosenkranz: Yes, for serious infringements
we apply criminal prosecutions, for less serious we have an administrative
system. But in some cases both could be applied.
Q790 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
We have heard all sorts of different views on which is best, quotas
or effort management, and I wondered where Sweden stood in this
debate.
Mr Rosenkranz: Quota management is not very
good but it is the best we have so far. Effort management is,
of course, in many ways much better. We tried to launch an experiment
in the Kattegat, which is a small region between Sweden and Denmark.
If you have the map in front of you you can see that there is
water between Sweden and Denmark. It is a very limited area. It
is mainly two Member States, or three with Germany but they have
opted out of this project. We are trying to see if we can have
a pure effort management system where the fishermen have much
fewer fishing days but they are allowed to land everything they
catch. This has become very difficult to agree on because they
want to land everything but on the other hand we are still bound
to the quota system through the European Community, so we are
trying to find a level where we can have enough effort for the
fishermen to be able to survive on a pure effort system but low
enough that we do not reach too high quota levels. The benefits
of an effort system where you can land everything you catch is
that you have much fewer discards, for instance. The disadvantage
is a bit of what I spoke earlier about, which is that we have
a huge fleet and they can, if they want to, fish very efficiently
with very few fishing days.
Q791 Chairman: Long holidays!
Mr Rosenkranz: Yes, but it becomes a bit awkward
if they can catch their annual quota in maybe 20 days, which is
the case with the low quotas we have at the moment. I think that
would go also for the North Sea, maybe not 20 days but very few
days, so we are getting to the same problem again with a very
big fleet which is not in balance with the resource.
Q792 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
But you are defining effort management as days at sea, are you
not? There are other ways of controlling it.
Mr Rosenkranz: Yes. We have no clear stand on
which would be the best. You have the kilowatt system, you have
the tonnage system, you have the days at sea system. We have tried
a little bit of all of these systems. I am afraid I am not expert
enough to say which is the best but we do want the effort system
to expand because with the quota system we see, at least in Sweden
and the Kattegat but I think particularly in the North Sea as
well, a lot of discards and for fishermen that is completely unacceptable
and they cannot understand, it and I understand that.
Q793 Earl of Dundee: How does the
Swedish Government assess the performance to date of Regional
Advisory Councils in general and those in the Baltic and North
Sea areas in particular?
Mr Rosenkranz: I have to be very careful here
because we find them extremely important and they need to be in
the centre of the decision-making process because, as I said earlier,
having a social contract with the fishermen is one of the most
efficient ways of controlling them, so having acceptance by the
fishermen when we make decisions is one of the vital keys to having
a system that works. In saying that, I do not think the RACs have
produced much so far, a bit but not much. We need to give them
time and we need to give them the resources to do it. I think
that we will find them a key player in having a scheme that works
but for that they need time and they need to develop.
Q794 Earl of Dundee: In due course
would you like these bodies to develop a management role?
Mr Rosenkranz: I think we need to give them
the chance and I think we need to find ways of giving them that
power[3].
It is very difficult because politicians want to keep the power,
of course, but at the same time in certain cases, and I would
say on a case-by-case basis, we will need to try to see if we
can give them those powers because we also need to make the RACs
feel that they have an importance. If they do not feel they have
an importance then we will lose them.
Q795 Chairman: Some of your colleagues
have expressed real concerns about RACs, seeing them as a threat
to the commonality of the Common Fisheries Policy and as the introduction
of regionalisation and even renationalisation of the fisheries.
Mr Rosenkranz: I would not agree, and that is
not because we have a Swedish Chairman in the North Sea RAC and
a Swedish Chairman in the Baltic Sea RAC.
Q796 Chairman: We have met your North
Sea Chairman.
Mr Rosenkranz: I think that in analysing the
difficulties with the scheme before the one in 2002 we saw that
there was too big a distance between politicians and fishermen.
The construction and the creation of the RACs was a way to remedy
that problem. I think it would be the wrong way to go to stop
that process. We need to integrate them even more in the decision
process but it is tricky and difficult and there will be a lot
of reluctance but we need that.
Q797 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Many of our witnesses have taken the view that the CFP is currently
over-centralised. They have suggested that the EU institutions
might in future decide on principles and a set of objectives but
devolve technical decisions on implementation to the Member States
or even to individual regions. Would Sweden support moves towards
decentralisation along these lines, and to what extent might this
type of governance structure exacerbate control and enforcement
problems?
Mr Rosenkranz: To the first question, yes and
no. It is a bit like the RAC issue. There are certain issues that
need to be centralised. There are certain issues that do not.
Looking at the new North Sea Cod Recovery Plan, for instance,
the Commission has proposed that effort management and the division
of effort between fleets could be managed by the Member States
themselves. The proposal sets the level of the effort and then
it is up to the Member State to divide this between fleets and
segments. That is, I think, an obvious way of decentralising and
letting it be at a lower level. This could be decentralised even
more. The Member States could leave it to regions to divide on
this, so we have ways in which we could decentralise. On the other
hand, taking, for instance, gear definitions and restrictions,
it is extremely tricky. I do not know if any of you have read
these regulations on gears—ten millimetres mesh with a square
mesh panel, et cetera. I never understand them. I always look
at them but I always leave it to my experts because I have never
been able to understand these regulations. Looking at the selectivity
and how this can be used, misused, abused, et cetera, I think
we will create even more problems if we decentralise this because
then we will have one type of gear in one Member State, another
type of gear in another Member State. They both claim that these
are very selective but then we need an independent scientist to
compare these measurements, and, speaking of the control, this
poor control agent who will have to look 20 or 30 different gear
fishing for the same kind of fish, it will be impossible for him
to do this. I would say yes to decentralising but looking at it
on a case-by-case basis, because if not we will have a lot of
difficulties.
Q798 Viscount Ullswater: Do you think
it is helpful then that DG Fish, now DG Mare, has split itself
into various sectors? Do you think that is helpful in encouraging
decentralisation?
Mr Rosenkranz: I think that is one of the reasons
they have done it. I do not want to comment on the reorganisation
but if they can find benefits from doing that I will, of course,
support it, and if there is a possibility that it will work, because
the Mediterranean is not the Baltic Sea and the Baltic Sea is
not the North Sea and we have to look it that way, that these
are completely different fishing methods, fishing times, fishing
fleets, segments, et cetera. They are not the same.
Q799 Viscount Ullswater: One size
does not fit all?
Mr Rosenkranz: No, it does not.
Viscount Ullswater: I think they have learned that.
2 This is of course difficult to know for sure, since
illegal fishery tends to be very unofficial. Back
3
This, however, is my personal point of view. Back
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