The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations (NFFO) has said that the strategy underpinning attempts to rebuild cod stocks around the North Sea has been fundamentally challenged.
The organisation has picked up on words used by the scientists reviewing the EU’s Cod Management Plan which takes in the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the West of Scotland. The phrase that has been seized on is, “Fishing mortality should not be expected to follow trends in fishing effort.”
This, according to the NFFO, means that time-at-sea constraints are not doing the job, adding that the Cod Plan was based on a "flawed assumption".
The NFFO points to the report, a joint ICES /STECF Working Group item, which brought fisheries scientists from all over the EU together. The ICES paper highlights a number of weaknesses in the design and implementation of the cod plan, including discards and unaccounted-for removals, which according to the report “constitute a significant proportion of the total”.
Further, ICES said that control instruments have been inadequate in that quotas on landings - even when combined with time-at-sea restrictions - have not been effective in bringing down fishing mortality. It goes on to say that although discards have been somewhat reduced, the measures could be bettered.
For example, the report mentions that at present 'reductions in effort' (time at sea) can be balanced with the percentage of cod in the catch: the authors think it would be more appropriate to base this on expected cod catches.
The NFFO adds that when the complexity of the first cod plan (2003-2008) proved unmanageable, responsibility for implementing effort control was shifted to member states through the allocation of individual pots of Kilowatt days for member states. However, it adds, “The apparent flexibility associated with this approach has been quickly recognised as illusory.”
The ICES report concluded that cod avoidance schemes aren’t working either. The report cited studies that have shown “while vessels will move to areas of lower cod density when impacted by real-time closures, they will move back again when the closed areas reopen and the net effect on mortality is difficult to quantify”. Furthermore, the initial reductions outlined in the plan were large and therefore likely difficult to attain.
