The best ‘farming’ approach means avoiding underfishing as much as overfishing. This means management by fishermen based on real time catch data and morbidity, not the scientists’ data alone, the latter often flawed in its collection (see the herring report in Part I, World Fishing May 2007) and perhaps years out of date. Real time is important if one agrees with the scientists at Edinburgh, that cod stock, for example, can grow by up to 30 per cent in a year.
Some of the Danish fishermen said they had tried to emulate the Faroese farming approach in Danish waters. One of the factors which may have inhibited Danish success was they consider the population of the Faroese plateau is less mixed in terms of species. This made it easier to target one fish and the same was not so easy in mixed Danish waters.
That said, based on Faroese days at sea rather than quota, with skippers and regulators sharing information to increase or reduce catch (depending on higher or lower catch volumes) there is long-term evidence that trawling a specific area on a ‘farming’ basis works well. (We can put to one side the row over trawls allegedly smashing sea mounts – no fisherman risks his expensive nets being snagged and lost on such mounts. With decent mapping and sonar, these mounts are avoided).
All skippers know that some stocks ‘disappear’ for several years and then suddenly ‘reappear’ in massive volumes – blue whiting for example. So one also needs to look over a long periods to make estimates for the right farming approach.
Menakhem Ben-Yami reported in WF May 2004 on 25 years of trawling data made available by Olaf Olsen, former Faroese Minister of Fisheries, and MD of the Faroese company Beta. Beta’s eight pair trawlers (as well as 22 from other companies) had been trawling continually over a fishing area of about 26,000km2. per annum for 25 years, clocking up millions of kilometres going back and forth over the same area eight or nine times a year. Catches continually increased and in 2003 their figures produced not only record catches-per-day but some of the best total catch from that area, ever. Ben-Yami also cited data on bottom-trawling resilience through regular ‘farming’ from research by the US National Research Council (NRC) on Ecosystem Effects of Fishing.
The public might understand better if one used the land comparison. Bad farming which overexploits the soil can cause desertification, too little land maintenance and use may mean reversion to wilderness and weed.
Long fish
There is not enough attention paid to long-term life cycles of different stocks. Contributors to WF might be said to favour the very long, life cycle view. The value and use of long-term records has been buttressed by recent Russian research. If you accept natural fluctuations, and that global warming and cooling have been occurring for millions of years then your catch planning and farming tactics must reflect that.
Even figures from ICES, on cod landings and recruitment, show almost regular fluctuations of about 8-11 years, according to Ben-Yami’s Faroes and Iceland research trip of July–August 2006. Haddock fluctuates consistently, but less regularly. “Saithe landings seem to fluctuate in a quasi-cycling manner with ebbs occurring about 15-16 years apart”. Skippers and scientists, he says, can usefully look at the Faeroes’ booklet covering a century (1903-2003) of commercial catch and their more or less regular fluctuations (Jakupsstovu and Andreassen 2004). “After almost record 2000-2003 landings, 2005-2006 cod catches were ebbing, and after hitting bottom they should go up again”, Ben-Yami’s report says. Of course that is also what fishermen were reporting at Edinburgh in 2007!
So this is where the significance of fishermen’s own data collection comes into play. Dick James of the Northern Ireland Fish Producers’ Organisation says his members have put in place a new system because they no longer “want to be talked down to” by scientists or the EU Commission.
“The Clyde working group project has set up a data collecting system, not just fish sources, biology and science but also the quality and marketing. It is our data, collected by us and we hold ownership of it and it doesn’t belong to the Commission.” In terms of aiding local management and decentralisation he says: “It puts figures on what we already know…and helps us put that viewpoint forward. Whether the regulators and managers accept that is something else. There is a major issue of trust here. The reason we think it is so important we own the information is that we sometimes suspect that the data we provide[d in the past] for the system comes back…and a wrong spin [has been] put on it.”
Jacques Bigot, Boulogne-sur-Mer-based national representative of France’s skipper fishermen in the Union nationale des syndicats des marins pêcheurs, says Edinburgh was useful in showing that scientists had begun to grasp what fishermen were saying about stocks and cycles. But the scientists were still wedded to their computer models. Whereas the fishermen, the “real professionals”, were ahead because they were “living” the sea and its stocks every day and knew the real effects of their work.
“The problem in the past is that…our data were just not taken into account. It is absolutely essential that the scientists work with the fishermen to process the data. We have dossiers from our great grandfathers, not just on the catch, but water temperature, dates, places, stock evolution – it is an absolute gold mine! It is true that fishermen have not been on the ball enough to exploit this data. This kind of explanation to the public needs resources of course, though we are working on that. But there are very strong lobbies at work on the TV and the newspapers putting out completely false scenarios,” Bigot added.
