More than seven out of ten edible marine species in the European Union are over-fished and coastal communities are dying. So you might think new draft reforms would help reverse this trend. Not so, says Victor Paul Borg, who investigates the impact of changes that the community fishermen themselves do not want
Dimitris Zannes is full of hope that bureaucrats from the EU’s Fisheries Commission will visit his island one day. If the officials want to carry out reform of fisheries policy correctly, he says, they must listen to us, the fishermen, so that we can tell them about the dire situation we are in.
Dimitris’ lament is shared by others, and in the course of my research a picture began to emerge of EU officials spinning policy projections from mathematical and financial models that are disconnected from the complexities of reality. Dimitris confirms this. The officials are technocrats who do not have a good idea of the true situation.
He is one of the main representatives of the Mediterranean Platform of Artisanal Fishermen – a group which formed last year in response to draft proposals outlining the reform of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. There are an estimated 35,000 artisan fishermen plying the Mediterranean Sea with the Platform representing fishermen in Spain, France, Italy and Greece. And whilst there is no single definition of artisanal fishermen’, there are certain defining characteristics. One of these is an upbringing in coastal fishing communities and a descent from a family of fishermen. In other words, traditional fishermen are born, not made, and most of them work alone or with family. Another characteristic is the way they will refer to the sea as if it’s a sentient being.
Dimitris, who is now 38, took over the family’s fishery business from his father and is a typical artisanal fisherman. He fishes from a 10-metre boat and uses mainly trammel nets and hooks attached to longlines. The EU officials need to understand why we must obey the rules of the sea, he says. And this where our experience is invaluable fishing is our culture, it’s our way of life, we have a lot of experience. But nobody is listening to us. What is the point of a fisheries policy that allows the destruction of the sea anyway?
He is talking about the proposed reform; the artisanal fishermen fear that the proposals are misguided, and that this chance to fix the existent policy may be lost. The current policy, (launched in 1983), has perversely led to overcapacity and overfishing more than seven out of ten edible marine species in the EU are overfished and coastal communities are dying and the reform is designed to reverse the spreading malaise. To this end, the EU Fisheries Commission got the ball rolling in the reform process by issuing draft reform proposals that rest on four main pillars: a ban on discards (ending the practice of fishermen discarding fish that are juvenile or inedible, or otherwise economically worthless), adopting a system of Transferable Fishing Concessions (the trading of catch quotas as a market mechanism to trigger innovation), achieving Maximum Sustainable Yield (fishing at sustainable levels), and the injection of special funds to reinvigorate fishing communities themselves.
It all sounds good but ironically, parts of the proposals, according to the Ocean 2012 a campaigning group made up of dozens of mostly-European NGOs – may actually have the unintended effect of intensifying overfishing and the demise of coastal communities.
And broadly speaking, the Mediterranean artisanal fishermen agree. Both believe that one key flaw is that the proposed new measures are too prescriptive and too generic. For example, says Dimitris, the situation in the North Sea is entirely different than the situation in the Mediterranean which means any new fisheries policy should be flexible enough to be able to tweak’ the solutions according to particulars of each case.
The proposal that has generated strident opposition is the notion of a system of Transferable Fishing Concessions (TFCs): the idea is to use the trading of quotas among fishermen as a smart tool that would give impetus to innovation, and reduce catch-overcapacity and overfishing. But Ian Campbell of Ocean 2012 calls this proposal a blunt instrument for reducing the number of vessels, which is not necessarily a reduction of overcapacity within the fleet. It’s a valid point; the EU’s own experience shows that capacity has continued to expand despite a drop in the number of fishing vessels, and that’s because large fishers have increased their capacity by technical advancements that has made their operations more effective and aggressive. The irony is that the technical equipment that has underpinned this is itself funded by EU subsidies, demonstrating the EU’s contradictory policies on the one hand paying fishermen to quit to reduce catch capacity, and on the other hand paying fishermen to implement technical advancements that increase capacity.
Ecosystems Ltd