Careful what you fish for

Lorna Siggins at the Irish times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ire ... 63315.html

SEVERAL YEARS ago some well-known British chefs and food writers started campaigns to highlight one of the more wasteful practices that is encouraged by the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy – discarding fish that are not part of a vessel’s authorised quota or permitted percentage of “bycatch” in the net.

EU commissioner for maritime affairs Maria Damanaki took up the cause, seeking an immediate discard ban. “Pandering to the public relations campaigns of celebrity chefs” was how Killybegs Fishermen’s Organisation chief executive Seán O’Donoghue described the move.

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There is a long-held perception in the industry here that the heavyweight sections of national fleets – such as the Killybegs mackerel supertrawlers – and the member states with greater lobbying clout, such as the Netherlands, France and Spain, are not subject to the same level of control.

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Flannery estimated each of the all-weather factory ships can process at least 200 tonnes a day, “high grading” to select the largest and dumping or mincing the rest. He calculated that the total catch during a 150-day period amounted to some 1,680,000 tonnes of fish.

These vessels “do not enter Irish ports and are not subjected to any audits of inspections from the SFPA”, he said.



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“But if we are to manage the ocean space, rather than just managing cod in the Irish Sea, the main stakeholders – as in fishermen – have to believe they are an integral part of that.”

Serious food for thought there Jim. The seas around our coasts cannot put up with that kind of pressure for long. As long as there's money involved and it's not regulated differently to a more sustainable level we are in danger of loosing one of our greatest resourses for the future.

The open ocean outside of territorial limits is treated as a commons where anything goes and is very hard to police as in principal regarding fisheries nobody has jurisdiction. Recently marine protected areas recognised internationally were set up around certain sea mounts in the north Atlantic with the objective of preserving deep sea corals and the life that exists around them. This action was a first but more needs to be done.

I fished off the Hook yesterday and have never seen so many joey mackerel in my life, http://www.anirishanglersworld.com/inde ... -hey-joey/, a direct result of over exploitation of the north east Atlantic mackerel fishery, period.

We have the opportunity to protect fish and shellfish within territorial waters if we so wish, but to do the job properly we need to develop international laws pertaining to fisheries conservation and related environmental protection within the open ocean.