UK fisheries sector chiefs have noted the need for improvements to monitoring and enforcement measures, should they get their wish for Brexit to mean only UK vessels can fish in its waters.
Speaking in London at a meeting over Brexit and fisheries, Jonathan Leake environment editor with UK newspaper the Sunday Times questioned whether existing fisheries enforcement was strong enough to protect UK waters.
If you have rules they need to be enforced, said Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisation.
That’s the bottom line and we need to have the resources in place to ensure that what will be our waters will be enforced.
The UK is relatively short on enforcement vessels, but Deas noted the dramatic change which has come with satellite monitoring and the kind of information technology and risk?based approaches to enforcement that we’ve seen developing over the last 15 years.
There are also approaches like the Norwegian system which uses entry/exit notifications and gateways where vessels, fishing in UK waters, have to go through check?in on their way back to port when they leave that country’s waters. So I think it’s certainly a valid question, but I don’t think enforcement poses insuperable challenges.
Bertie Armstrong, head of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF), said he had been told in conversation by an EU international negotiator, if you restrict access to your waters but give some, then all the European fishing nations will do is to enter your water for ten minutes, and misreport all the fish into their own waters that they’ve caught there.
In other words it would appear that on the ground inside the EU, the possibility of illegal behavior is actually openly being discussed. That would be absolutely unacceptable, as Barrie says there are electronic means and we would have to take a hard line view on widespread illegality if that were to turn out to be the other catching nation’s responses to any arrangements we put in place.
He added the SFF did not expect widespread illegality, should the UK move to reserve its waters only for its own vessels.
If we set limits in our waters in access and opportunity then it behooves those other nations to behave themselves, he said. There are electronic means to indicate when they are not, and if we can take a leaf out of Norway’s book of a fairly robust enforcement system, where arrest and fine is immediate and obvious, then I think we should be able to take charge of that.
Several speakers at the forum including representatives from NGO ClientEarth and Daniel Owen, marine public law specialist with the UK’s Fenners Chambers raised the issue of how making unilateral management decisions could threaten fisheries.
Owen, addressing Armstrong, stated that while shared fish stocks might have an uneven distribution across different nations’ waters, they remained shared stocks; the UK deciding upon its own quota for a migratory species while within its own waters, and EU nations then doing the same, could result in overfishing.
So yes, I appreciate that there may be limits to how much the EU can actually catch in its own waters, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t fish as much as it can within its own waters, and that EU?flagged vessels won’t, for example, fish right up to the EU side of the median line in order to fish as much as possible.
And so I wonder… whether there is a threat to sustainability through unilateralism either way, by the UK or by the EU [and] whether your point about unevenness of stock distribution is actually a natural constraint and will avoid this problem, or whether it isn’t and whether we need to look further and be very careful.
Deas responded that science would be critical in defining shares under zonal attachment.
There shouldn’t be an argument here, it should be down to objective, agreed science on what is the zonal attachment in EU waters, Norwegian waters, UK waters, and that should be the basis of the agreement.
Undercurrent News previously reported that common fisheries policy practices are likely to continue to play a part in the UK’s fisheries management, even post-Brexit.
Earlier in 2017 the European Commission itself also warned that many member states have yet to implement EU fisheries regulations. Some countries are not properly enforcing fisheries law, either by not checking what boats or doing, or by avoiding categorising infringements as serious, added NGO ClientEarth.
NGOs have also argued that onboard electronic monitoring is an important step for the UK to take in order to maintain the sustainability of the recently Marine Stewardship Council-approved North Sea cod fishery.
2017 Undercurrent News