Who sunk our fishing industry?; With a new report threatening to

Magnie Stewart, skipper of the aptly-named Defiant, was trawling for haddock 35 miles south-east of Lerwick late on Friday. He was fulminating: "In the great scheme of things in Britain, if it's two or three thousand people losing their jobs, what does it matter? But when you're right at the sharp end of it - and I'm having to sit here and I'm looking at paying off half my crew and maybe even having to lie up half the year, and I know for a fact if we were left in peace we could make a go of it - I find it a bit galling that the whole of the industry is being destroyed on this great altar of Europe.

"The Commission has been trying its level best now for years to get British fishermen put out of business. We had the cod closure, we had mesh sizes, we had everything thrown at us, stupid draconian quotas, everything, and we're still here. So this is the final push to shut us down completely."

For every Magnie Stewart and each of his three-man crew, there are four or so employed onshore. Multiply that by the crews of roughly 500 boats in the white fish fleet - all but the flotilla of smaller herring, prawn and creel boats - round the coast of Scotland.

Tell them of last week's plans to ban them from fishing until the dire state of the cod stocks recover, but that nobody knows when that will be. And expect a furious, defensive response. These are close- knit communities which know how to orchestrate fury.

The scientific assessment and recommendation published on Friday would ban not only cod fishing but the haddock, whiting and prawn fishing that can result in inadvertent 'by-catch' of the mighty cod, which is a big beast and therefore least likely to escape through mesh.

There is little doubt such closure would devastate the industry. Only the super-rich boat owners could survive it for a year. Many have huge loans on their boats to pay off and the shore-based support industries would quickly disappear. The recruitment crisis in the industry would worsen: it is already bad as young people walk away to more reliable jobs elsewhere. Fishing communities big and small would face a bleak future, if any. Stewart is pinning his hopes on a compromise that might give him 150 days at sea next year.

So what do the skippers do? They demand a boycott of Brussels, or call fisheries minister Ross Finnie "a big useless haddie" and tell him to resign. For this is the blame game on a grand scale. If it isn't politicians, officials and marine scientists - Scottish, Whitehall or Brussels will do, depending on taste - fishermen blame seismic testing used by the oil industry, pipeline-laying, global warming, unchecked growth in seal numbers and, of course, foreigners. To the west, the Spanish and French boats are despised for their government subsidies which land a box of fish for half the price of a Scottish boat; to the east, it is the Danish with their industrial fishing of sand eels, on which cod feed, to provide fishmeal for pigs.

It is also possible that Scottish fishermen have been part of an international industry which has plundered the seas with ever- greater efficiency, and have only themselves to blame. But that's not quite the way they see it. And telling a story of short-sighted greed doesn't fit well with the image they prefer of bravely risking their lives to deliver fish to the Great British dish.

So, to dispense with the blame game, what has gone wrong with fisheries around Scotland, and what hope is there of putting it right?

The science starts by being tainted, which helps the fishermen mistrust it. All those who work on fish stock assessment are civil servants. Magnie Stewart thinks it is just "political science". But the boffins' defence is that their findings, based on monitoring quayside landings and 500 days at sea in survey vessels, are mixed with those of six other North Sea countries, and 12 more in Europe, Canada and the US to make up the deliberations of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in Copenhagen. The European Commission asked them to assess its plan to save the North Sea cod, apparently forgetting that it might not like the answer. After being arrived at during the most recent ICES meeting, the controversial result was audited by an independent panel of three North American experts.

The panel found that cod stocks around Scotland, including the Irish Sea, are now in such a dire state that there should be a complete closure. They are "at their lowest ever recorded level and are in danger of collapse unless urgent action is taken". And because cod are a by-catch of haddock, whiting and prawn, other key fisheries should be closed too. Haddock has problems too, the panel found. Although 1999 was a bumper year for spawning, the following three years have been dire, so a short-term feast is heading towards medium- term famine, with a 75% drop in stocks within only two years.

How long would the shutdown last? Dr Robin Cook, director of the Fisheries Research Service, a Scottish Executive agency in Aberdeen, says that could be five or 12 years - or for keeps. The only experience of doing this has been the Canadian cod fishing off Newfoundland, closed 10 years ago with 30,000 job losses, and still showing no sign of recovery. That helps explain why fishermen are beginning to think of giving up on cod.

Hamish Morrison, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, points to warmer water fish turning up in the North Sea, suggesting climate change is pushing cod north where it prefers its waters chilled. He goes on to portray the Scottish coastal fishery as peripheral to a 700,000 tonnes-per-year catch which remains healthy in the north-east Atlantic around Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Russia, and from which most of the cod which supplies English chippies is sourced (Scots preference is for battered haddock).

He harks back to memories of the 1920s when cod stocks plummeted, later to return, and to the dip in haddock stocks in the early 1960s which was followed by an extraordinary boom. Like share prices, fish stocks can go up as well as down.

Relations between fishermen and scientists were supposed to be getting better before last week. Part of last year's (pounds) 27 million deal on decommissioning a fifth of the Scottish white fish fleet, taking it from around 600 to below 500 boats, was to put money into chartering commercial boats for improved surveying. And as fishermen have struggled to fill even their sharply reduced quotas - only 50% of the haddock quota has been reached 10 months into this year, and around 30% of whiting - it was beginning to seem like their experience was matching the statistical projections.

But these latest projections are based on old data, say the fishermen's leaders, which does not take account of decommissioning, and of an agreement to increase net mesh sizes, intended to let younger fish swim free. The stats are also, they say derisively, subject to 40% uncertainty. But that is a dangerous argument to use. The last projections have turned out to be far too optimistic, and if the latest ones are similar, the cod's spawning stock could be as low as 15% of its sustainable level.

What is also going badly for the Scottish fishery is its place within Europe. The first line of attack is against Ross Finnie, but he is only one small player in a vastly complex negotiation, running into next month's council of fisheries ministers in Brussels, followed by the all-night session in December at which quotas are thrashed out.

To listen to environmentalists, who are newly trying to find common cause with fishermen, what is striking about this annual horse- trading is that it raises quotas, in the average year, by 30% above what the scientists recommend. That is not accounting for all sorts of fudges which allow fishermen from different countries to find various ways of bending the rules. And as the green lobbyists go on to complain, this is a system based on measuring what is landed on the quay, not on the by-catch which is thrown back into the sea for being under-sized or over-quota.

Nationalists are eager to point out that Finnie has to get agreement from Whitehall's fisheries minister, Elliot Morley, on his negotiation position, despite Scotland having around 70% of the UK fleet. (Nationalists are prominent among the white fish representatives while the chairman is a Tory, and while Morrison is well-known as a Liberal Democrat, his deputy is a prominent Conservative, helping explain why this issue is so politically charged). And although Scotland occasionally leads in negotiations in Brussels, there is no saying how well recognised that is by partner countries which can exploit the UK's ambiguous position.

The seriousness of the fish stock problem in the North Sea is such that north European countries are increasingly eager to secure reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, which has for 20 years struggled to manage stocks and mediate clashing national interests, its failure now laid bare. They want a multi-year agreement to replace the annual December battle, and major cuts in fleet capacity.

But against the north is ranged an organisation called Friends of Fishing, including Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Ireland, which are in alliance to hang on to vast subsidies and the over-capacity that goes with them. They have a genuine problem: Spain, in particular, is dependent on fisheries onshore as well as offshore to sustain many vulnerable and politically sensitive communities, without the fallback of the oil industry which supports much of coastal Scotland.

With talks already well under way, Sweden has led the way by closing its cod fishery voluntarily, allying with Germany to lead the charge for CFP reform. The UK backs them, with reservations to protect its historic rights to Atlantic fishing. The positive signs are that Italy may be breaking ranks, and willing to sanction a reform deal, possibly leaving France isolated.

But as France on Friday expertly outflanked the British on agriculture reform, to protect its subsidised farming sector, there is no saying it will not do so again on fish. And all of these fish quota and reform talks can hinge on deals being made elsewhere about farming, enlargement, budgets or trade, which have nothing to do with cod at all.

In the midst of such complexity, what can be forgotten is the simple need to find a balance between preserving fishing communities next year and beyond, and preserving the fish stocks to sustain them. Continuing the current rate of plundering the sea is no answer. But Morrison asks what happens if the industry is closed down and the stocks come back in five years - who fishes for them then?

It is a challenge for his members as well as the politicians. They have long complained about being locked out of the negotiations at which their fate is decided annually. What they have not done is explain how they would preserve fish stocks for their own communities' survival, and their track record is no recommendation.

There is no business quite like theirs, with so many people around the world so dependent for jobs and for food on creatures whose breeding and behaviour they barely understand. There are real mysteries to the deep. Fishing depends on a dogged optimism, even through the bad times, that something will come up. But it faces an equally dogged and increasingly well-founded pessimism that it won't.

Additional reporting by Alan Crawford Marine scientists last week warned that cod stocks around Scotland may not recover unless there is a fishing ban on them - and other species they are caught with - for as long as 12 years. The haddock stock is also in danger.

Fishery bosses claim the fleet cannot survive a tie-up, and many coastal communities are at risk. Now their argument goes to Brussels, where horse-trading between European states will decide the fate of Scottish fishing.

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