Published by UK government towards the end of last year, the post-Brexit Joint Fisheries Statement (JFS) is supposed to bring improved social, economic, and environmental benefits to the country’s seafood industry as an independent coastal state. But for many stakeholders, the strategy doesn’t go far enough in its support of industry, particularly in safeguarding access to fishing grounds.
Setting out high-level rules on how to deliver key fisheries objectives in the Fisheries Act 2020 and how to manage fisheries while restoring the marine environment, the JFS forms a key part of a new Fisheries Framework. It contains positive elements, including recognising the importance of the UK’s fishing, aquaculture and processing sectors and working with supply chains on key issues like access to labour.
However, the recent Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum policy conference: Next steps for fisheries policy in the UK heard that the JFS fails to bring clarity to the issue of spatial squeezing and the displacement of fishing activities by other marine industries and environmental protection initiatives, not least offshore energy production and marine protected areas (MPAs).
Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) Chief Executive Elspeth MacDonald told the conference that spatial pressure is among the biggest threats now facing UK fishers.
“I think it gets very scant reference in the fishery statement, yet it’s a really major issue, and one that many of us are going to have to grapple with,” MacDonald said. “It’s a really big challenge for us as we look ahead, so it’s disappointing it only merits two paragraphs in the joint fishery statement in terms of what to do about displacement.
“It is worrying that governments are pressing ahead with policies that will likely increase the displacement of fishing with so little prior consideration of how to manage it,” she said.
MacDonald warned displacement could force more vessels inshore, which would in turn have consequences for the hard-pressed inshore grounds, and that some inshore vessels might then venture offshore where they could encounter safety challenges.
Safety could be further undermined by conflicts between static and mobile gears, she said, adding that in this scenario, sustainable fisheries plans could be jeopardised.
A seat at the table
Chief Executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation Chris Ranford told the conference the “massive appetite for offshore renewable energy” and the growing number of MPAs are challenging the increasingly important role that fishing has as a source of food security.
“As an industry, we’re neither anti-renewable nor anti-marine protection; we recognise the importance of both to achieve other policy aims. But what I really want to highlight is the importance of bringing fish to the table much earlier in the marine spatial planning process as a way to co-locate and minimise the unknowns that will happen if we aren’t included,” he said.
“Probably the most worrying thing is that nobody’s really asked the industry what it will do as a result of the spatial challenges. Will it move to new grounds? Is there space to do that? Will big boats be sold to buy three smaller ones – putting a squeeze on the inshore fleet? Or will fishers simply go out of business? Either way, we face catastrophic displacement and many unintended consequences.”
Michel Kaiser, Professor of Fisheries Conservation at Heriot-Watt University, believes that moving forward, areas that are important seafood production areas need to be classified.
“At the moment, we’re quite happy identifying areas that are fit for purpose for wind farms, tidal power and so on, but nobody is talking about the necessity to identify key areas for fishing. At the end of the day, we’re talking about food production. And if we undermine our ability to produce food, it’ll be very difficult to wind that back once those areas have been blocked out. I think it’s an important area of discussion, and one that’s entirely justified to give the industry business certainty going forward,” he told the conference.
Another critical area that needs much greater focus is the supply chain and the improvements that can be made so that fish caught or farmed by UK businesses, and then processed by British processors can thrive, said Kaiser.
“Some of our key blue-chip fisheries have actually gone bust as a result of post-Brexit complexities that have occurred at borders and in [foreign] trade. Improvements need to be made if we’re truly going to realise the profitability of our fishing sector, which at the end of the day exports very high-quality luxury products overseas.”
Progress through technology
Nevertheless, Kaiser believes the JFS remains a good opportunity for the UK to become world-leading in terms of sustainable fisheries.
While countries such as New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, the United States and Canada are ahead of the UK in terms of managing their fisheries in a sustainable manner, it has an opportunity to move things that would make it much better placed, he said.
“The JFS will allow us to take control of the situation and use technologies to our advantage – to make the industry much more sustainable.
“But there’s a lot of work to do. The elements that make this possible now are the advent of technologies and the fact that they’ve become miniaturised and far less expensive. We talk a lot about remote electronic monitoring, and we typically think about that in terms of enforcement, but that’s just one element of it. What we could be doing is turning our fishing vessels into smart fishing platforms where they’re capturing data that is useful to the industry – informing it how to fish better.”
Kaiser said the “ultimate ambition” of the JFS is for healthy seas, healthy stocks and healthy fishing communities, and that the more efficient the catching sector becomes at catching the same volume of fish, the less it interferes with the marine environment.
“Not only will that improve profitability, it will also improve conservation outcomes. That will feed back into sustaining the health of the stocks that we’re exploiting. But we can only do that with data and information,” he said. “We keep talking about fishermen contributing data. This is entirely possible – every fishing vessel is an environmental sampling platform, we just need to capitalise on that.”
MacDonald agreed that there’s a “tremendous capacity” for fishing vessels to be much more involved in terms of data data.
“We’ve got a modern, efficient fishing fleet in Scotland, with some very sophisticated vessels. There’s a great deal these vessels could do, and we would certainly be keen to have conversations with government about how we can how we can do that,” she said.
