Edinburgh – what next?

However, some participants came out of the meeting with rather mixed feelings. No doubt many speakers, especially on the part of the industry, spoke their mind about the EU management’s directives and the underlying science and offered their own advice. But have they persuaded the management to review its approach?

One of them wrote: “The paradox is that while the European Commission (EC) seems to think that their Cod Recovery Plan (CRP) has failed and wants to take even more rigorous steps, the fishermen say that their cod stocks that are on their way up.”

“The worst thing that can now be done would be adding more restrictive measures on top of others, but in spite of all the discussions and ‘industry’s input’, this is exactly what the EC is going to decide on”, wrote another.

So has any change occurred in plans, opinions, approaches of any of the parties, or has all that has happened is that industry and management keep talking on parallel lines that can never meet?

My impression has always been that the industry in the EU-controlled area has not been dealing with the root of the problem, which is inadequate science and, hence, questionable advice on the status of the stocks and their exploitation and mistaken management steps. Perhaps it was feeling incompetent to dispute scientific opinions of scientists and managers equipped with mathematical-statistical models and precise figures of how many fish there are on the bottom of the sea, and how many of them should be caught. Thus, its approach was reduced to trying to squeeze out some more DAS, slightly larger TACs, etc.

But, as one can learn from reports from the Edinburgh Symposium (www.nsrac.org), some kicks, notably from North Irish representatives, sent the ball straight into official science’s home field.

The managing establishment had to face criticism of its science also on the part of academics. For example, a Canadian scientist, Professor George Rose, told the audience that impoverished stocks cannot be ‘recovered’ just by diagnosing overfishing and treatment by catch restriction and even moratoria, because other factors are also responsible for the death of cod on the Grand Banks as well as for its subsequent failure to recover. Another scientist, Dr Chris Reid said that a ‘regime shift’ has affected abundance and timing of the plankton that cod larvae feed on. Forage organisms shift with marine climate change and there is clear evidence of fish moving northwards at the same rate as plankton. Dr M. J. Kaiser suggested alternative management by adjusting fishing operations to the life history of cod.

But it now seems that ICES and the EU management came to Edinburgh with a ready-made and deep-frozen diagnosis and prescription, namely: overfishing and further restrictions. There were industry representatives present, who talked ecology, while management representatives talked of reducing fishing mortality. There were no signs on the part of managers that they might heed to more ecological approach or to Jon Kristjansson’s thesis that much of the ‘fishing mortality’ they are mentioning is in fact natural mortality. The traditionally applied assumption that natural mortality in a fished stock is a constant, arbitrarily assumed to be 17-20%, has never been scientifically verified. It has been repeatedly censured by outstanding scientists, among them Ray Beverton who estimated non-human predation in the North Sea to exceed fisheries’ yields. Nevertheless, ICES keeps applying this absolutely fallacious value. Another hardly discussed sacred cow is the belief that big spawning stocks produce large recruitments and vice versa.

The term ‘overfishing’ is too often mistakenly used for every impoverishment or depletion of a fish stock. But fish populations expand and collapse, sometimes in cyclic or semi-cyclic climatic time-series without the ‘help’ of fishing, or because of coastal and upstream pollution, invasion of exotic pests, or destruction of habitats essential for some reproduction and growing processes. Stocks assumed overfished might appear all of a sudden in force, as it happened some years ago on the Faroese Plateau, where fishermen thought that the fish were displaced by unfavourable environmental factors and migrated back when the conditions returned to normal. Ignoring all this must lead to wrong management. Overfishing is one factor, but there are also other actors in the boom-and-bust fishing reality. No way can management steps ‘recover’ stocks, when they are on a downward section of their natural cycle.

Therefore, rebuilding of stocks cannot be achieved just by controlling output or even whole moratoria (see Grand Banks and other cod stocks), if the environmental conditions, both abiotic and biotic, are not favourable to them. But, if they make another and competing species flourish in a multi-species fishery, the latter species should be fished, never mind by-catch of the depleted species.

Resistance to external criticism due to institutional inertia is, as a rule, proportional to the size of the institution and its investments in selection and perpetuation of its policies. Isn’t the Atlantic fisheries management system one of the biggest and most expensive in the world? Are its scientists not trained to follow the single track of ecology-independent population dynamics, and accustomed to the safety of being a part of a firmly established and, for many years, hardly challenged system, and to produce piously the ‘best available science’?

There’s ample evidence that the ‘best available science’, stock assessment methodologies, catch and effort advice, and management steps currently practiced in Atlantic fisheries are quite inadequate. If not ICES itself, maybe Commissioner Borg should call for a symposium, where ICES/EU and independent scientists would openly debate the issue and discuss new directions. And if the initiative doesn’t come from the EU, perhaps FAO Fisheries should take up the glove? Somebody should.

benyami@actcom.net.il