When a Danish trawler docks on the island of Rügen in the early hours of a stormy Thursday morning, the Euro-Baltic plant at Sassnitz-Mukran suddenly jolts to life.
Via a network of subterranean tubes, 1,400 tonnes of slippery North Sea herring are pumped from the belly of the ship and belched out onto an assembly line inside the factory on Germany’s largest island, where the silvery-blue fish are blow-dried, weighed, gutted and either sliced into fillets or chopped into bite-sized chunks.
Forty hours earlier, these oily foragers were basking off the coast of the Shetland Islands. Thanks to the European Union’s common fisheries policy (CFP), they now float in vats of marinade, gently shaken every six hours by a robot to spread the brine. Some of them will soon be ready to be wrapped around slices of pickled gherkin to become rollmops, a popular German hangover cure.
If Boris Johnson’s government were to have its way, however, the assembly line at Sassnitz-Mukran could soon come to a halt. As negotiations on post-Brexit fishing rights get under way , the UK has reaffirmed its intention to become an independent coastal state when the extension period ends this year.
Operating under the UN convention on the law of the sea rather than the CFP, Britain would have control over an exclusive economic zone up to 200 nautical miles off its shore and wants to annually set its own quotas for those it allows to fish in its waters.
With the promise to take back control resonating particularly loudly in totemic Brexit-supporting fishing communities such as Grimsby, this is likely to mean preferred access to British fishermen and pushing out EU boats.
The fear at the herring processing plant on Rügen is that it won’t even come to that. The worst-case scenario if we get a hard Brexit after all, without an agreement on fishing rights,said Uwe Richter, the factory’s director, [is] we’d lose our access rights to the British economic area in an instant and wouldn’t have any opportunities to bring in any herring in the second half of the year.
In theory, under such a scenario it would be possible for Scottish trawlers to deliver herring to Rügen instead. But if a bust-up over fishing rights were to derail negotiations over a trade deal between Britain and the EU, it could quickly spell trouble for Euro-Baltic.
If there is no trade deal we get whacked with tariffs and paperwork, so the herring stinks to the heavens by the time it arrives and the whole business becomes unaffordable, Richter said. Herring is a very sensitive fish. You can’t afford to transport it from auction to auction. If you want a good product, you need the shortest routes possible.
Such fears are shared in Berlin’s seats of power. The German government believes the explosive debate around fishing, which makes up only 0.1% of the UK’s economy and 0.02% of Germany’s, has the potential to sour the tone of more important negotiations, such as over trade, security cooperations and financial services.
If the negotiations get bogged down on fishing, which is not crucial economically but highly symbolic and emotive, it becomes harder to have a more sober debate further down the line, said a German official familiar with the talks.
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