More fish in the sea?

With about 15 per cent of the world’s protein intake coming from what is pulled out of the sea it is little surprise fishing is a multi-millionpound industry.

Communities across Scotland are still dependent on - and fiercely proud of - the trawlers which spend days at sea bringing back several thousand tonnes of fish - many of which are destined to go abroad for a premium price.

Yet the process of getting the fish out of the sea is anything but simple and there the commercial fishing industry is arguably subjected to more scientific scrutiny than any other.

Reams of figures are produced every year to assess the relative levels of stock worldwide, the rates they are spawning and the rates that are being fished.

The ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea) assesses details of fishing stocks worldwide which includes breakdowns per section of all the seas and oceans that are fished.

Those figures, though, are open to misinterpretation, which has led to claims in several publications that there were “only 100 adult cod left in the North Sea” - when actually there were millions.

The Marine Conservation Society produces its own Good Fish Guide which gives a traffic light rating for fish. As well as stock numbers and fishing rates, it takes into account the environmental impact and other issues such as whether they are farmed, line caught or from a trawler net.

It makes mixed reading, with some fish such as bluefin tuna given a 5, or red, rating as the most unsustainable, and others, like Atlantic cod caught in the Baltic Sea, given a 1, or green rating.

With fish shoals moving region to region, making it hard to build up an accurate picture of a definitive fish stock, most of the figures usually associated with fishing are those easier to measure.

Between 2007 and 2011, the total fish landed in Scotland in tonnes fell from 292,430 to 239,702, but it rose in value from £329.3m to £380.4m.

According to analysis of the ICES figures by Marine Scotland of the North Sea, West Coast and Shelf Edge - the principal areas fished by Scottish vessels - Scotland’s waters include an estimated 69,182 tonnes of cod, 235,099 tonnes of haddock, 319,831 tonnes of whiting, 2.4m tonnes of herring and 3m tonnes of mackerel.

Most of those fish stocks are estimated to be within safe levels - the right side of the maximum sustainable yield - with the exception of cod in the North Sea and both cod and haddock in the West Coast region.

However, the stocks proving to be the most controversial are mackerel, while they are comfortably above the ‘safe’ level set by scientists of ICES of 2.2m tonnes, earlier this year, the species was removed from the Marine Stewardship Council’s accreditation rating - and as a result was downgraded from the top ranking on the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide - because there were fears the rate of fishing was too high - which could see stocks fall in the future.

Scottish fishermen may well have felt hard done by, as the reason for the downgrading came, not as a result of their own efforts, but because Iceland and the Faroe Islands - who are outside the EU - were setting their own catch levels that clashed with European quotas.

Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said: “Scotland had 140,000 tonnes of mackerel to catch last year and will have roughly the same this year. It’s well and truly above the maximum sustainable level of biomass. Every fin of mackerel that is caught by the Scottish fleet is caught sustainably now.

“We raised the Marine Stewardship Council accreditation in the first place, in response to our own less than perfect record a decade ago.

“Now we find, regrettably, that it’s been such a success story in building the stock and building a global market for those fish that Iceland has decided it wants to cut a slice off the side.

“If the Marine Conservation Society wants to make a contribution to fixing the problem then the sharpest attack they could muster on Iceland and the Faroes for banditry would be very helpful, but instead they’ve addressed it to consumers.” He also said that calls for everybody to “get around the table and sort it out” were not enough. “Everybody agrees that, yes, if you could get around a table and sort it out that would be great - but we’ve tried it 16 times and it hasn’t worked thus far.” However, Holyrood understands that the Marine Conservation Society is currently investigating ways its rating system can take into account the political row that is continuing between Iceland and the Faroes and the EU and Norway so that it can better differentiate between the two different catches.

Of course, the other issue that puts a question mark over sustainability is on fi sh being discarded back into the water, either because they are under-size or the quota for that species has already been filled.

Th e practice occurs particularly in mixed fisheries where more than one species swim together making it harder to select species - although Scottish fishermen have been introducing nets with large five or six-foot holes, which allow other species to escape.

Discards are an unwanted side-effect of the present Common Fisheries Policy, which is currently being reviewed and EU fishing ministers met in Brussels last month to agree a plan to phase out discards by 2019 - with Pelagic fish (mackerel and herring) being the first where it will apply next year.

A major operation involving Marine Scotland and Grampian Police revealed that some boats and processing plants were bypassing both quotas and discards by illegally landing fish and hiding them from official counts.

The so-called ‘Blackfish’ scandal saw new rules brought in in 2005 - and even meant quotas were reduced to make up for the tonnes of fish that were landed illegally.

Discards also were the focus of the first series of TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Food Fight.

His latest series is tackling a separate issue of increasing the number of Marine Protected Areas at sea - but his approach has not won him fans among Scottish fishermen.

Chaz Bruce, a member of the ‘Real Food Fight’ pressure group and a prawn fisherman based in the North-east of Scotland, said: “We are really a bit frustrated now. For years we have been trying to reduce discards, conserve stocks, we’ve altered our nets. We’ve had to pay to go to sea, we have to buy our days.

“You wouldn’t see this in any other industry - try telling Tescos to close their doors for half a year and see if they make a profit.” A spokesman for Hugh’s Fish Fight production company, Keo, said: “Fish Fight has never pointed a finger at British fishermen over discards or accused them of a lack of action in tackling the problem. I don’t think anyone could come away from our programmes thinking that fishermen like throwing fish overboard.

“We’ve asked the politicians to change the rules that force fishermen to throw dead fish back in the sea. We believe that banning discards will encourage more selective fishing.

One reason Britain has taken a strong lead in Europe on discards is because our fishermen have shown what can be done using catch quotas and selective gears.” In Scotland among fishermen and the bodies that represent them, there is a great urgency to point out the efforts that have gone into bolstering fishing stocks.

The number of vessels has fallen to just over 2,000 - the lowest ever recorded and discard rates are falling, with the reduction among North Sea whitefish trawlers being cut from 63 per cent to 19 per cent between 2008 and 2011. Whole areas have also been cut out for fishing vessels.

Sam Stone, fisheries officer from MCS, said this work was being acknowledged. He said: “Scotland’s seafood industry are really doing some brilliant things. They are, in many instances, going above and beyond what is absolutely necessary.

“While some of their stocks are not looking healthy, like cod stocks, they are making some really valiant efforts, they are sacrificing themselves to some extent to really improve these fisheries.” He added that while from the North Atlantic it was still a red-grade under its traffic light system, he hoped that the next ICES stock assessment would provide better news and said: “When that rating does change we really want to make a big deal out of all the effort that the Scottish fishing industry has gone to.” Food and where it comes from is a sensitive issue at the moment, supermarkets and even schools have had to pull products from the shelves after the scandal of products found across Europe labelled as beef, but containing horsemeat.

Stone said: “I honestly hope that sort of shock that the horsemeat has given us does translate to fish as well. Seafood is highly traded and it can be highly processed and pass through many different countries just like beef.

“Similar to the beef issue, traceability in seafood is really fundamental because if the consumer wants to make a conscious effort to eat, say haddock, from Scotland as opposed to from somewhere else, then they need to have some reassurance that’s what they are getting.”

Paul Williams, chief executive of Seafish, said: “I think UK retailers have an extraordinary good rating on sustainability. In the UK we work harder and are under more pressure from the consumer than probably any other retail market in the world.

“Seafood is part of the supply chain and a lot of what is talked about actually ignores that.

“Fishermen aren’t just doing this as a way to spend an entertaining day - they’re doing it because it’s the start of the supply chain that puts food on people’s plates.

“That isn’t for a minute saying we’ve got to put food on our tables, so we should ignore sustainability issues, I’m saying that seafood is held to a very high standard compared with a lot of food production.”