Scotland look to further measures to help declining whitefish fleets

The Scottish fleet has endured enough through decommissioning and the time has come to put boat scrapping measures on the backburner and focus on other fisheries management measures.

This is the view of Hamish Morrison, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, who believes that if the Scots fleet shrank any further, the infrastructure of the whole industry would be in danger of collapse.

‘I think the time has come to say enough is enough as far as decommissioning is concerned,’ he says. ‘Otherwise there is the very real danger that when stocks recover there won’t be enough boats to catch the available fish.

Reduced fleet

The other important factor that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that if the fleet is reduced below a certain level there is a danger of marginalising the infrastructure of some of our fishing ports, no longer making them viable landing centres.’

The whole MAGP mechanism — the EC capacity reduction programme – is also fundamentally flawed, according to Mr Morrison, given that it seems to focus more on naval architecture rather than sound economics. Even more worrying is the fact that the EC has still given no indication of its plans for the next round of MAGP cuts, despite the clock ticking away and the current scheme already being extended by a year.

‘The engine capacity and tonnage of a boat are largely academic to the whole decommissioning process. It is the quota that dictates how much a boat catches, not the size of its engine. If a skipper wants a certain size of engine on his vessel, then that’s entirely up to him and it should be left to simple economics to determine whether he has to acquire more quota to cover the running costs.’

But whatever happens on the decommissioning front, there is no denying that this will be a watershed year for the fishing industry with the Review of the Common Fisheries Policy finally looming. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, along with its counterpart south of the border — the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations — has been pressing hard for zonal management to be a key plank of the review.

Such a scheme would involve the creation of management committees for different sea areas of the EU, allowing for regional management solutions to regional issues.

Mr Morrison says: ‘We believe zonal management will happen in some form or another and we have produced a template for such a scheme.’

Zonal management

For it to work properly, the SFF believes there needs to be very strict criteria on the representation of each zonal management committee, ideally comprising of fishermen, scientists and national officials. If leeway were given to other interest groups, then the effectiveness of the system would be diluted, taking away the likelihood of collective agreement.

The Federation has always maintained that zonal management should be an evolutionary process, and in the first instance the committees would assume an advisory role, before perhaps being given more powers at a later stage.

Moving fisheries down to the local level is simple commonsense and in many ways would help complement some of the perceived benefits that devolution has delivered to the Scots industry, including increased access to ministers. It certainly brought dividends at the end-of-the-year quota talks, with ministers from both sides of the border fighting hard to win a reasonable deal.

More problematic for the industry in the shorter term is the potentially serious implications of the proposed cod and hake recovery plans. One possibility under the plan, which still has to be finalised, would be the introduction of days-at-sea or effort limitation. As far as the SFF is concerned, such a scheme would be a complete non-starter unless financial compensation was involved.

As World Fishing went to press, the two UK fishermen’s federations were considering mounting a legal challenge to the Government’s interpretation of the rules. Things may be better for the Scottish industry since devolution — but by how much is another question.