Brexit won't bring back the bass

Bass stocks are collapsing. This has been clear for years and our recommendations for how to turn the fishery around and how to allocate access to any remaining bass fishery using environmental, social and economic criteria have now been dealt a devastating blow. Scientific advice now is for a total moratorium on fishing for bass. ‘ICES advises that when the precautionary approach is applied, there should be zero catch (commercial and recreational) in 2017. EU landings were just over 2,000 tonnes in 2014 and have been declining as the stock shrinks and EU measures limit catches.

Sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) Spawning Stock Biomass (SSB) peaked in 2010 and has been declining since and is now below Blim (a key indicator of stock collapse)  in the North Sea, Irish Sea, English Channel, Bristol Channel, and Celtic Sea). Source: ICES advice June 2016.

On 19 December 2014 the UK made a formal request to the European Commission to take emergency measures to protect sea bass stocks. Measures were put in in place but they were not strong enough and they have not been properly enforced by any Member State including the UK, where the organisations with a duty to do so are hampered by cuts as a result of misguided UK austerity policies.

Emergency measures and declining stock have brought down landings of bass – but any positives will take years to materialise. Source: ICES advice June 2016.

Throughout the build-up to the annual December meeting of fisheries ministers, MEPs made some great points about the urgent need for long term management; however some politicians around the UK coast made totally misguided arguments about the EU ‘banning seabass fishing in our waters…with no warning’. The emergency measures were EU-wide and the warning was five years of scientific advice to reduce fishing mortality or face stock collapse. Not paying attention and then saying it’s a surprise is no excuse. ‘We want our fish back’,  blaming ‘the French’ and how great Brexit would be for bass are all deeply flawed lines of argument, showing the total lack of understanding of the issues – what can one coastal MP do about a migratory, trans-boundary stock anyway? Bass migrate. They move between inshore and offshore waters. They spawn in areas that, even if we reinstated our 200nM limit, would still be fished by other nations in the Channel, Celtic Sea and North Sea because where there is less than 200nM available (it’s the median line which international maritime law applies to if the area is less than 200nM).  I.e. French, Irish, Dutch, Belgian and Spanish boats could still target these and other stocks…and rightfully so. They are a shared resource, not ‘our’ fish. The table below shows the 2015 breakdown.

However, landings are poorly recorded, illegal (IUU) sales of bass both from commercial vessels and from unlicensed commercial fishermen are rife, and there are legal loopholes for sales of bass below 30kg.  Enforcement too is a major issue for bass and indeed many other species.  The ill-judged, late-night decision to have different rules for drift gill netting and fixed gill netting has been a dream come true for fishermen cynically trying to evade the restrictions.

For the next two years at least, the CFP still applies. How can the UK use its remaining time in the EU to shape the long-term management of bass, and what is needed to actually turn the fate of this iconic species around?

The EU needs to be tough on by-catch.   Despite the collapsed stock, English and French trawlers are asking (via the Advisory Councils) for an increase of bycatch allowance from 1% to 5%.  This would be an incredibly regressive move, providing an economic incentive for them to continue catching large quantities of bass and giving them a green light to complete the destruction of the stock.  Instead, the by-catch allowance needs to removed completely and these vessels should be required to fish more selectively and take active steps to avoid bass aggregations, for example by communicating with other boats in the area if bass are found.

CFP Article 17 requires incentives to be given for selective gear and sustainable fishing.  The request for an increased by-catch allowance does to exact opposite; it rewards unselective fishing at the expense of small scale sustainable fishermen.

The Dutch fly shooters need to be restricted too.  They are hoovering up non-quota species such as gurnard, squid and mullet as well as a substantial by-catch of bass, which are often under size and therefore dumped. An increase in bycatch allowance to 5% for them would be immense and mean a further negative impact on the bass stock for absolutely no gain, just because these vessels can’t select what they fish for and don’t avoid areas where they know bass aggregate.

Time to be tough

·         Seasonal and spatial closures - The EU needs to close pair the bass trawl fishery permanently. The UK should use its remaining voice to push for this. 

·         EU-wide, we need to shut areas to mobile trawl gear once it's clear bass are being caught. This approach (the ‘’moving on’’ approach’’) has been used successfully to help recover cod stocks.

·         Fixed and drift netting for bass should also be restricted –– fixed nets should not be set in areas where bass are being caught and drift netting for bass should be closed.

·         All these restrictions need to be resourced properly and we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to what’s going on at sea. The penalties need to be proportionate, presently they are minimal and do not serve as a disincentive.

·         Any minimal targeted fishing for bass must focus on high dependence (those sustainable hook and line fishermen for whom bass is a high proportion of their landings) and be accompanied by long seasonal closures (6 months) and 100Kg vessel catch limits per month during the open season. Failing this, all gears must be subject to a full moratorium on fishing for bass.

·         The EU needs to agree a long-term bass management plan now and regardless of what the future holds, the UK should be a signatory to it, as we share responsibility for the collapse and therefore also the responsibility to help the stock recover.

·         Most importantly – consumers should stop demanding wild caught bass, and fishmongers, supermarkets and restaurants should refuse to stock or sell wild bass until the stock has recovered.

·         Fishonline makes it very clear that wild bass is not a sustainable or ethical choice.

Would these measures work?

If we look at the success of the cod recovery plan, which industry complained about initially and now takes credit for, we can learn lessons for how to bring back the bass. Cod are now bouncing back (albeit nowhere near their historical high levels) and this "success” is down to EU-wide measures, which were properly enforced. In some ways, Bass is now in the same situation as Cod was some time ago and, despite the predictable complaints; it is indefensible for the bass fishery to continue in its current form. We can’t afford to lose a species for further short-termism, greed or a failure to make an effort not to catch it in the first place. [A major difference between cod and bass is that bass is a non-quota species. Cod in contrast is a quota species which must adhere to ‘relative stability’ between the amount of the total catch for each stock which each Member State gets, year on year. If the same were to happen to bass, the fact the French industry is responsible for the vast majority of catches would favour them, as they would be entitled to that same larger share as the stock rebuilds. Something the UK Government was always keen to avoid, but following Brexit even more so.]  

Recreational fishermen are arguing that a new Long term Management Plan is needed for bass and that the fishery should be restricted to recreational and hook & line fishing only, since these deliver significantly higher environmental, social and economic benefits for society from a scarce resource, compared with other forms of commercial fishing.  Now is the time to start taking positive steps to manage the fishery to deliver best value to society, a point we have made repeatedly over the years.

This is an issue the UK can't solve alone regardless of how you voted.  

Chris Williams

This is a guest blog from Chris Williams, Project Lead, Fisheries and Marine Environment at the New Economics Foundation (NEF).

You can read other blogs by Chris at http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/by/chris-williams.

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We forgot to tell the fish

If you were a fish in UK waters right now, you might want to reconsider where you swam. Because according to some, after leaving the European Union we are going to have more fish and chips for British gullets. That place where you thought you could safely hide out, feed, and have your fishy ways with each other, well that might be up for grabs too. Because although we do safeguard parts of our UK seas for you through domestic site protection and other seasonal closures, the majority of this (at least via protected areas) comes from places set up through European law. And, the reason you’re generally not fished to smithereens is because we took it on the chin long ago that we needed to work with our neighbours to ensure a share that was fair and didn’t drive you to extinction. That was called the Common Fisheries Policy, and it took a while to sort it out, but we eventually got there.

There are only so many ways to divvy up the fish in the sea, and only so many fish in the sea. Outside of the EU this simple conundrum remains. We could try to lure more fish our way from elsewhere, but fish rather stubbornly like it where they do and have millenia-old migrations patterns. There will be no stealing fish away that way. Maybe by protecting and restoring some of the British seabed (a habitat once as diverse as any rainforest), we could offer better places for foraging and reproduction and therefore more fish for domestic consumption. Perhaps we would also be better able to keep out foreign fleets once we’ve left the EU. A win-win?

So how would that work? We’d need to fully look after the protected areas that we’ve already established so that damage and over fishing doesn’t take place within them. We’d need to bring the sites currently set up through the EU into domestic protection, emulating their reason for being which is ecologically sound. We have made great progress putting in good protection for many of our sites, but there is a way to go. Maybe bringing those sites into domestic protection would give us more control over what goes on in them? We already know however, that not enough of the sea is protected, even with the sites that already exist – more areas are needed to make sure fish and other marine wildlife can do all of the things they need to do in all of the right places – no point giving you a feeding larder but no sexy boudoir. So, we’d have to protect even more of the sea, and we’re obliged to do that under international obligations that have nothing to do with the EU anyway. So, safeguarded sites, fish feeding and spawning away, free from interference, and then swimming into our nets fat and happy – and your fish and chips assured! There is still a bit of a problem there. What? …..

Well there is this tricky little problem called historic rights. You fish are valuable, and correspondingly many nations have secured rights to fish in other parts of the world and in some cases these rights go back hundreds of years. There exist somewhat ancient, but still entirely legal laws of the sea that precede the CFP and allow other nations to fish in our waters. And, we Brits in our great exploration of the seas also secured similar rights. Many of our current rights are set out in and negotiated through the CFP. We leave the CFP, and those rights need to be negotiated all over again. Do you think our bargaining position is strong? So Mr Cod, Haddock and your friends, it’s not going to be as easy as some might think. We might well end up with something, a few years down the line that looks and feels a lot like the CFP. But in some ways that’s a distraction from the real issue of marine ecosystem collapse. Maybe we can instead have something that performs the same function as the CFP in terms of assuring sustainable fish stocks, but which also facilitates and further crystallises the need for a transformation of the marine environment in our domestic waters. This  is so dearly needed and would put us on a world leading platform.

Carrie Hume

Carrie is MCS Director of Conservation and Campaigns. She grew  up in the seaside town of Lowestoft, with a long family legacy of entrepreneurial fisherman, who were ultimately doomed by the early-twentieth century collapse in the local fishing industry. Currently land locked in Herefordshire, a committed environmentalist, she is coming full circle back to her marine roots to help recover our great British seas.