Northeast Atlantic coastal states have been slammed by the North Atlantic Pelagic Advocacy Group (NAPA) for failing to meet their own deadline of 31 March 2023 to agree shares of the mackerel catch.
NAPA, which represents some 60 global retailers, foodservice companies and other supply chain stakeholders is now asking what it will take for these coastal states to meet their own sustainability commitments.
It highlighted that the Northeast Atlantic mackerel fishery has been subject to overfishing since 2009 and that no concrete steps had been taken to rectify the “fundamental management flaws” that are fuelling the problem.
Over the last decade, negotiations between the seven parties have routinely broken down, with them instead looking to maximise their individual shares, NAPA said.
In 2019, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification was suspended from the mackerel fisheries due to poor governance and inadequate management.
NAPA was established in 2020 to use market pressure to drive the coastal states to put aside their politics and instead collaborate to ensure that catches do not exceed sustainable levels. It has since established a fishery improvement project (FIP) with a three-year deadline (to 2024) and published individual consequences of failure – ranging from reviewing sourcing to walking away.
The coalition said it felt that some progress was being made during the coastal states’ annual talks last year, with the parties setting themselves the deadline to reach a final agreement on the sharing of mackerel quotas before 31 March 2023. If this had been achieved, it would have meant a collective agreement on allocations that, when summed together, wouldn’t exceed the sustainable catch level for mackerel recommended by scientists.
Three meetings were scheduled in the first-quarter of 2023 to achieve this goal. At the first meeting, each delegation stated their commitment to reaching a sharing agreement and there was an acknowledgement that no party will get 100% of what it was asking for. However, NAPA said the second meeting was back to the “old ways of finger-pointing and obduracy”, and the third meeting concluded “with a whimper” on 30 March, with the meeting’s report noting the coastal states “required more time to reach a comprehensive and inclusive set of arrangements”.
NAPA said a direct consequence of this outcome is that the NAPA FIP for mackerel and herring will be downgraded to a D rating This may well have serious implications for its members who have committed to only purchasing from FIPs rated A-C.
“We had thought that Northeast Atlantic mackerel was being taken seriously by the coastal states, and their self-imposed “hard deadline” would stimulate agreement on catch shares. But once again the market, and the consumers they serve, are left frustrated and disappointed. The obstacles are wholly political. The solution lies entirely with the coastal states and their willingness to reach agreement. Their own lofty commitments to sustainable fishing are worthless in the face of this outcome,” NAPA Project Lead Dr Tom Pickerell said.
NAPA pointed out that all the coastal states catching Northeast Atlantic pelagics have agreed to uphold the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 14: Life below water, which states: By 2020, effectively regulate harvesting, and end overfishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and destructive fishing practices and implement science-based management plans, to restore fish stocks in the shortest time feasible at least to levels that can produce maximum sustainable yield as determined by their biological characteristics.
