Category: Contact

EU Common Fisheries Policy reform, from the inside

by Frédéric Le Manach

In 2009, the European Commission initiated the third reform of its Common Fisheries Policy. Although the basic principles of this new framework – which will stay in place for the next 10 years – were adopted in early February by the Parliament, the Commission is still regularly hearing experts on various topics. This process aims to propose specific amendments to this basic framework, before the final decision around June, once the Parliament, the Commission and the Council of Ministers reach a consensus (yes, this is a rather complex system). One of these hearings was held in Brussels on 19 February, and it focused on deep-sea fishing. Claire Nouvian invited me to attend, and although I was expecting a vivid debate, I was not expecting such vividness.

Claire Nouvian – a Pew Fellow, journalist, director/producer, director of BLOOM (www.bloomassociation.org), but principally woman of action – was one of eight experts heard by European Union (EU) members of parliament (MPs) during a special session on deep-sea fisheries. Other names in this group of experts included Tom Blasdale, chair of the ICES Working Group on the Biology and Assessment of Deep-Sea Fisheries Resources (WGDEEP); Phil Weaver from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre; Pascal Lorance from the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer); and Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. I will not go into much detail about these seven talks. To put it in a clamshell, everybody sort of agreed that deep-sea trawling is harmful to many long-lived species (such as fish, sponges and corals) and fragile ecosystems, and that we know very little about them (there are analytical assessments for only three species, and footage is very rarely available).

Claire introduced the French deep-sea fishery, and the bottom-line of her talk was that despite rather important subsidies, the three companies involved in French deep-sea fishing are all in deficit! The example of Scapêche, which takes between 60 and 86% of the total French deep-sea catch, is staggering: between 2002 and 2011 it received €9.34 million from the state, plus an additional €16.9 million cash-injection from Intermarché, the supermarket chain to which it belongs [1]. (If you are looking for a definition of vertically integrated systems, here you go.) Yet during this 2002-2011 exercise, it had €0.1 million of cumulated net losses after tax. A French MP, co-chair of the fisheries committee, then said something along these lines: “Are you saying that such companies are philanthropic? That they give away money to something that is not worth it? I don’t buy it!”

That was it. At this point the extremely politically correct way of telling white lies or saying nothing too controversial was abandoned for a much spicier and polarized argument. A couple of MPs started to shout, accusing each other of being blind or deaf. Others tried to be more constructive, as one British MP and another French MP said that we should start inquiring upon the use of EU citizens’ money, and further refuted the co-chair’s argument that because some fishers were relying on this fishery, we should maintain it despite a high risk of collapse for most stocks.

Then, we ran out of time. Big surprise. My personal feeling is that this hearing was designed to restrict the debate. Controversial topics were kept for the end, whereas they should have been at the forefront. As a result, I am actually quite confused about the outcome of this meeting. Of course, its aim was not to make decisions, but rather to propose amendments to the Common Fisheries Policy proposal that is currently being reformed. However, I cannot guess what these amendments will be. Some MPs are definitely pro deep-sea fishing, others are firmly against it, but a number of them remain undecided and they will likely base their vote on who shouts the loudest. (Please remember that empty vessels make the most noise.)

Isabella Lövin, Swedish MP and author of the must-read book Silent Seas, managed to get the deadline for these amendments postponed to mid-March. I will follow-up with a report on the progress.

You can listen to the entire meeting at:
www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/committees/video?event=20130219-1500-COMMITTEE-PECH

References
[1] http://www.bloomassociation.org/download/Accounts_Scapeche_Eng.pdf

A journey to South America

A fishing boat at Taganga, a village in Colombia. (Photo: Robin Ramdeen)

by Robin Ramdeen

In the first week of November 2012, the 65th Annual Conference of the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute (GCFI) took place in Santa Marta, Colombia. GCFI facilitates the exchange of experiences and ideas in fisheries science, management, governance, conservation and education. The conference was a testament to the region’s commitment to the stewardship of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and the marine resources therein. The Caribbean Sea is a special place for me, because I grew up in Trinidad and because I discovered my niche in Caribbean fisheries while doing my Master’s thesis on the fishing of queen conch in Tobago. The theme of this year’s conference was “Artisanal fisheries: importance, implications and challenges for management,” a topic which is familiar to many of us. Artisanal fishing is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as fishing carried out by individuals or households requiring low investment in technology and gear. By this measure, the majority of Caribbean fisheries operations are artisanal or small-scale.

The conference’s keynote speaker was Dr Ratana Chuenpagdee, who is no stranger to the Sea Around Us Project. Dr Chuenpagdee completed her PhD under Dr Daniel Pauly’s supervision in 1998 and is now the Canada Research Chair in Natural Resource Sustainability and Community Development at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s. She urged the GCFI conference participants to consider ways to elevate the profile of small-scale fisheries, which – in terms of providing employment for fishers and catches for human consumption – are simply “too big to ignore” [1]. Dr Chuenpagdee is a powerhouse, and I was eager to chat with her at a socio-economic café where I got the opportunity to ask whether we erroneously mislabel our fisheries as small.

In terms of technological capacity, small-scale fisheries are certainly “small” compared to industrial ventures, but they are rather large in terms of the employment they provide for fishers as well as the quantity of catch they supply for human consumption [2]. Undoubtedly, the dearth of quantitative catch data associated with small-scale fishing sectors perpetuates this false notion of their size. As Dr Pauly plainly states in his foreword to the book “World small-scale fisheries: contemporary visions” (edited by Dr. Chuenpagdee), “countries cannot be bothered with the logistical and administrative nightmare that monitoring and reporting on small-scale fisheries often represents” [3]. As a native of the Caribbean and a research assistant with the Sea Around Us Project, I feel it to be my duty to reconstruct this historical fisheries information.

During my presentation at the conference, I explained how using information on catch, effort and seafood demand (i.e., consumption, as per household surveys) allowed me and my colleagues to reconstruct total marine fisheries catches for 10 Caribbean island countries from 1950 to 2010. Unsurprisingly, these catch reconstructions illustrated a substantial level of under-reporting in the Caribbean. For example, the reconstructed catches of Haiti and Jamaica were 3 and 4.3 times higher, respectively, than catches reported by these countries to the FAO, where the data become part of the world “catch” database. Overall, approximately 5 million tonnes of unreported catches were estimated for these 10 Caribbean countries during the 60-year period that we examined, with an average of 54,000 tonnes of unreported catches each year. The main discrepancy was due to unreported and under-reported catches from the artisanal, subsistence and recreational sectors. However, reporting seems to be improving as unreported catches in the early time period accounted for 80% of reconstructed catches, as opposed to 50% in the present time period.

The presentation was well-received and I had a number of scientists and fishers as well as an anthropologist interested in learning more about the Sea Around Us Project. Despite the English-Spanish language barrier, the GCFI spirit demonstrated that we are just one planet, working together for our precious oceans – questioning, sharing and improving things.

References
[1] “Too big to ignore” is a research network and knowledge mobilization partnership which aims to address the issues and challenges facing small-scale fisheries; http://toobigtoignore.net/
[2] Jacquet J and Pauly D (2008) Funding priorities: big barriers to small-scale fisheries. Conservation Biology 22(4): 832-835.
[3] Chuenpagdee R, editor (2011) World small-scale fisheries: contemporary visions. Eburon, Delft. 400 p.

Down at the World Ocean’s Summit

by Daniel Pauly

The British magazine The Economist hosted a huge “World Ocean Summit” in Singapore earlier this year, designed to find solutions to the ills that beset our oceans. And more precisely, to identify remedies that entrepreneurs could find ways to invest and profit from. It sounded like a reasonable goal, because we tend to live in democratic countries with market economies shaped by private enterprise, so I accepted their invitation. The head of the World Bank attended, as well as ministers from various countries, CEOs of big fishing companies, heads of international environmental NGOs, hedge fund managers, scientists…

It should have worked, but it didn’t really, despite the beautiful resort where the event took place and the flawless organization. I think it was because – mostly subtly, sometimes not so subtly – our very determined hosts, from the Editor-in-Chief to the lowliest of The Economist staffers, were pushing for “market solutions,” insisting that the remedies we identified had to make money for hedge fund managers and other investors.

It sounded all right at first – but how would this work if a health care system, for example, wasdesigned this way? Wouldn’t it leave too many people untreated, because no money can be made off them? Also, are fisheries not a gigantic example of a “market failure,” as economists call the mess we are in? (Although it is a small mess compared with that of our banking system.) But there was no space at the summit to discuss any of these things, and the complementary roles of governments and civil society. Everything that moves had to be turned into a commodity, and even some things that don’t move, like marine protected areas, which were identified as one of the places for profitable investments.

Thus my disappointment and perhaps that of Fisheries Centre Director Dr Rashid Sumaila too, who also attended. I did have the opportunity to address one of the summit’s working groups where I mentioned that the invitation of The Economist, besides being a compliment, also was a challenge, because I am often accused of spreading gloom and doom, in spite of being neither gloomy nor doomy.

The point is that a doctor – and I am one, if not of medicine – must correctly diagnose the disease at hand before being able to propose solutions leading back to health. The disease of industrial fisheries, I suggested, is “expansionitis” and it is caused largely by demand for fish in rich countries. Indeed, industrial fisheries have gone so far that we’re expanding into the world’s oceans at a rate of 1 million km2 and southward by 0.8° of latitude per year. Expansionitis is feeding essentially insatiable markets in Europe, North America and Northeast Asia, from finite fishing grounds in Africa, Latin America and Tropical Asia. Japan and the US import 60% to 70% of their food, the EU 70% to 80%. Industrial fishing is not about feeding the world’s poor.

Then, because we we re supposed to emphasize remedies, I listed those remedies for expansionitis about which there is
widespread agreement:
• Reduce and eventually abolish subsidies to fisheries – they are what feeds expansionitis;
• Rebuild fish stocks in developed countries, so that they need not grab so much of the developing countries’ fish, and export the lessons learned to the developing world;
• Allow developing countries to catch and process their own fish, and export a part of the value-added products to the developed world;
• Create arrangements providing exclusive access (to coastal resources in both developing and developed countries) to small-scale fisheries, which catch far more than industrial fisheries and could catch even more if not exposed to competition from industrial vessels;
• Reduce and eventually ban discards (Norway does it) and consume small fish directly, rather than turning them into fishmeal.
There is a huge reserve there.

But let’s face it: these remedies (all “market solutions,” incidentally) if implemented, would be the result of mostly public policy, which then would benefit the fishing industry in the long-term. In the short term, however, these remedies will be fought against tooth and nail by our friends from the private sector, that is those The Economist wants us not only to work with (which is a good thing), but to put in the driver’s seat. These are the reasons why I felt down at the Ocean Summit.