Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

FISHING

OPINION: A blemish on Denmark’s environmental record

A Copenhagen-based environmental economist accuses Denmark of neglecting scientific advice and undermining efforts to combat overfishing.

Published: 7 December 2016 11:11 CET
OPINION: A blemish on Denmark’s environmental record
The author says that Denmark's position that it is acting in support of small fishing fleets "doesn't hold water". Photo: Iris
Denmark is often lauded as a world leader on environmental issues, and for good reason. From food waste to renewable energy, Denmark sets an example for others to follow. 
 
Yet recently a failure has emerged that may blemish Denmark’s reputation: overfishing. Denmark’s fishing minister, Esben Lunde Larsen, who will remain in his position in the new government, is determined to fight scientific advice. 
 
As Ed Stern from the Fish Secretariat detailed in The Local last month, every year the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) provides scientific advice on the maximum amount of fishing that should take place to allow different species to rebuild in line with the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. 
 
For cod in the Western Baltic, the advice for 2017 fishing limits did not make for happy reading. The number of cod is declining so rapidly that ICES advised an 87 percent cut in next year’s cod quota – the amount of fish that can be caught, in total.
 
While other countries backed the advised cut, the large-scale fishing sector in Denmark advocated a cut of only 20 percent – a proposal backed by Larsen.
 
At the annual Baltic quota meeting in October, ministers emerged in the early hours of the morning to announce that a compromise position of 56 percent had been agreed. Taken together with Baltic fishing quotas for herring, salmon, herring, sprat and plaice, a new report I authored calculates that Denmark is the country with the fishing quota set the highest above scientific advice. This is one environmental league table that Denmark should avoid topping.
 
Larsen defends the government’s position as acting in support of the struggling small-scale fishing fleet, but this argument doesn’t hold water.
 
As the profits diverge amongst the large and small-scale fleet, a smaller amount of total quota but with better distribution to the small-scale fleet could meet both the short-term financial challenge in the industry while also improving the long-term sustainability of the stock. Studies have shown that the economic benefits of rebuilding fish stocks to levels that support larger catches are greatest when fish stocks are rebuilt as fast as possible, versus a slow (and risky) recovery. 
 
On fishing at least, the Americans have a good solution: don’t let politics override scientific limits. In the United States, fish stocks are on a solid path to recovery: credit is due to a policy whereby scientifically determined fishing limits are legally enforced. The political process can alter quotas, say to maintain stability, but only at levels below the scientific limit.
 
On December 12-13th, the quota negotiations move to the North Sea and North Atlantic, where Denmark will again be present at the table. With quota reductions proposed for North Sea herring, there are concerns that Denmark may again emerge to fight against scientific advice.
 
The Common Fisheries Policy has in recent years started to work in addressing overfishing. It is hugely disappointing that Denmark is the country that’s doing the most to hold it back. 
 
Griffin CarpenterGriffin Carpenter is an environmental economist based in Copenhagen and works for the New Economics Foundation, a think tank working to build a new economy.
 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

FISHING

ANALYSIS: ‘We’re ready for war’ – How far will France’s post-Brexit fishing row with Jersey go?

War has been declared between France (population 66,000,000) and the Bailiwick of Jersey (population not quite 100,000), writes John Lichfield as he examines the gravity of the latest cross-Channel fishing flare up.

Published: 5 May 2021 16:01 CEST
Updated: 6 May 2021 13:25 CEST
ANALYSIS: 'We're ready for war' - How far will France's post-Brexit fishing row with Jersey go?
Photo: Fred Tanneau/AFP

For now, it is a war of words. However, the French minister for the sea, no less, has warned that she will, if necessary, switch off the lights in France’s tiny, troublesome near neighbour.

Over 90 percent of the tiny UK crown dependancy’s electricity comes through three cables from France just over 12 miles away.

What’s it all about? Fish of course. And Brexit.

Who is right and who is wrong?

It is complicated. Fisheries are always complicated, even slippery.

There is some right and some wrong on both sides but, as far as I can establish, the Jersey government has behaved oddly – provocatively and with less than complete honesty. There is no similar problem between France and the other big Channel Island, Guernsey.

The French government suspects that Boris Johnson’s government has engineered the dispute as part of a wider campaign of minor harassment of French fishing boats to distract from its own surrender on fisheries rights in the Brexit deal just before Christmas.

The UK government says that fisheries rights in Jersey waters are an entirely an affair for the island’s (or bailwick’s) government. Britain is responsible only for the Channel Islands’ diplomatic relations and has been seeking to broker a deal for Jersey with the EU and France.

That may be legally correct. The Channel Islands are the only fragment of Duke William’s dukedom to have remained independent of France. They are “owned” by the Queen but they are not part of the UK and were never part of the European Union.

The present dispute has similarities, however, with a completely unnecessary spat engineered recently by the British government over the details of post-Brexit, French access to the waters between 6 and 12 miles off the English coast. In both cases, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) speaks of “unfortunate misunderstandings” over the details of licencing arrangements for French fishing boats.

I would be happy to accept such assurances from Defra if it did not have such a long record of lying about fishing – especially under its present Secretary of State, George Eustice. 

Defra over-fished its “trust us” quota long ago.

On the other hand, the French are not entirely blameless. It was somewhat excessive of Annick Girardin, the minister for maritime affairs, to threaten to turn off Jersey’s lights while the dispute is still under discussion. Some of the nationalist rhetoric of fishermen’s leaders and local politicians in Normandy and especially Brittany has also gone off the deep end.

In essence, the dispute has nothing to do with Brexit and is everything to do with Brexit.

The complex pattern of fishing rights around and in between the Channel Islands has been a vexed question for centuries. Such rights were outside the EU Common Fisheries Policy.

In 2000, Britain and the Channel Islands government signed an agreement with France (The Treaty of the Bay of Granville) which established a pattern of rights for French boats up to 3 miles from the islands’ coasts. Last year, Britain and the islands said they were terminating the treaty as part of the “it’s all our fish now” policy as the end of Brexit transition approached. An interim deal was reached.

Despite anxious complaints by Norman and Breton fishermen and politicians, the question of the Îles Anglo-Normandes was not addressed in the final flurry of Brexit trade negotiations in December. Last month it seemed this had finally been settled.  French boats which had habitually fished in Channel Islands waters would automatically be licensed to continue doing so.

Over 250 Norman and Breton fishing boats rely on their catches around the islands – an industry which supports 900 families and 2,000 jobs on sea and land. At the same time, Channel Islands boats depend almost entirely on their rights to sell fish in Granville, Cherbourg and other French ports.

When they examined the licences issued by the Jersey government last Friday, however, French fishermen found they bore no relation to what had been promised. The licences varied, with no apparent logic, between the right to fish for 170 days a year and the right to fish for seven days.

Claude La Vaullée, a Norman skipper who has fished off Jersey for 40 years, found that his boat, Le Cach, had been given the right to fish for 11 hours a year. He told the regional newspaper Ouest France, that he and other skippers had now equipped their vessels to “re-stage the Battle of Trafalgar”.

Such restrictions were not mentioned in the negotiations and were not communicated to Paris or Brussels, French officials say. They were a unilateral decision by the Jersey government.

David Sellam, head of the joint Normany-Brittany sea authority, said : “We are confronted by people who are not trustworthy. Jersey has been taken over by an extremist fringe, who want to reduce French fishing access and profit from Brexit.

“We’re ready for war. We can bring Jersey to its knees if necessary.”

Jersey politicians say it’s all a big misunderstanding (which suggests that they are preparing to climb down). The external Relations Minister Ian Gorst told the BBC yesterday that the licences issued last Friday were based on proof of past fishing activities. But there was no time limit, he said. The French fishing industry could provide more evidence if they needed extra, or more generous, licences.

Do the French fishermen have such evidence easily available? Some do and some perhaps don’t.

But all fishing activity is now so strictly regulated that it should not be difficult – if there is goodwill on all sides – for the French government to provide reasonable proof.

Is there goodwill on the Jersey and UK side? I expect that the threat of black-outs (however excessive the threat) will concentrate minds in Saint-Helier.

I suspect this dispute will not last long.

SHOW COMMENTS