The sins of their fathers

THE realisation probably came some time ago, maybe as long as a decade ago, but still they carried on blithely. Now they are beginning to acknowledge their mistakes. On the day of reckoning, the day of the Euro slashing of fishing quotas, the fishermen landing their catches at Peterhead last Thursday, finally admitted what they have privately known for some time: they have fished the seas dry.

"Anyone who says there is no problem is not going to the same seas as me," says Phillip Morgan, a skipper who trawls on a twin rig with his brother Joseph in the boats Our Guide and Our Guardian. Between them they have more than 30 years of fishing experience and they know that this is as bad as it has ever been. At the beginning of the year Phillip took what he thought was a reasonable gamble in leasing #15,000 worth of quota from another licence holder, thinking their own would be used up. The gamble turned out to be a busted flush, he could not even catch his quota let alone anything extra.

Phillip's son, Alex, has come down to help unload the boats as he does every time they return from sea, and given that it is 6.30am on a cold December morning, that is quite a commitment from a 15-year- old. Alex has been on one fishing trip but he is unlikely to follow his father to sea as Phillip and Joseph did.

Their father became a skipper in 1961 and retired 14 years ago. "He probably saw the best of the fishing, but we see no future," says Phillip. "I can push my sons in another direction, but I don't know anything else."

At 39, Phillip would like to see at least another 10 years at sea but on the evidence of last week's catch it doesn't look too likely. We survey his ice-packed catch, boxed and ready to be sold in the next few minutes. Morgan provides a running commentary as he points to the different species: "Haddock, small haddock, there aren't any big haddock. There's a phenomenal amount of small haddock in the sea, they're in decline this year. Prawns, they're a good size, and cod. This is the danger species."

He does not need to spell out what "danger" means. The shadow of Newfoundland, where the Canadian cod fishery collapsed entirely after over-fishing, hangs heavy over the town.

But, so too does the reputation for overfishing, for landings of overquota fish, "black fish", and an avarice that has driven North Sea cod stocks to the brink. Everyone at the market, fisheries officers and skippers, say that black fish landings are minimal now, a combination of strict enforcement and lack of fish has seen to that. "If there was a lot of fish it would still be going on," says Morgan who agrees that the swingeing cut in this year's quota means that boats will probably return to the practice rather than throw already dead fish back into the sea.

"Listen to that," says Morgan as the auctioneer moves across his catch and the bidding for cod moves rapidly up to #150 a box. "That's #15 a fish. If I throw that over the side I might as well throw myself over with it."

Peterhead is not in a festive mood at this time of year. This is the season in which the politicians and the scientists and the European Commission decide on how much the fishing industry, the mainstay of the town, can catch in the next year.

The process ended in the early hours of Friday morning when, after 13 hours of negotiations, the politicians agreed to cut the cod quota by nearly 50%, to 48,600 tons of which the UK's North Sea share is 18,930 tons. It is recognition that cod stocks are at the point at which they may never recover. This year's quota reduction will not save the fish unless a powerful international recovery plan, which was not agreed last week, is put in place.

So who has won the cod war? Evidently not the diminished cod in the boxes at the fish market, nor the fishermen. The UK government is claiming some kind of victory out of a Common Fisheries Policy negotiations which everyone, in the cold light of dawn, admits is the management of extinction by committee.

The new Scottish Fisheries Minister, Rhona Brankin, back from her first negotiations over the UK fishing quota, admits that the process is "bizarre". It involves horse trading between EU nation states in which ministers and civil servants stretch the scientific advice as far as they can in favour of maximising gains in their nation's fishing interests. However, throughout the talks (held behind closed doors) the fishermen's leaders pace up and down outside in the corridor, or in the lobby of Brussel's Europa hotel. The industry is not involved in determining its own future and consequently fishermen mistrust the process and the result.

Brankin says: "The way we do it just now is not the best way to do it. We need a longer term view, we need to be very aware of the science and the need for conservation of key stocks so that there is a sustainable industry in the future."

She argues, however, that she has achieved a good deal for the UK fishermen - the macho nationalistic line for industry consumption - but she admits in the next breath that in future the CFP and quotas have to be based on long-term views and on strict scientific advice. For politicians it has always been a compromise between protecting fish and protecting jobs, but they are approaching an endgame and it is getting late to restore a balance.

Not long ago the cuts in quota, particularly this year's loss of some whiting quota to the Danish dominated industrial fishery, would have been condemned outright by fishermen's leaders as a sell-out. More than 1000 jobs in fishing and in processing are on the line as a result of Friday's decision but crucially, the fishermen are blaming nobody but themselves.

Mike Park, a senior member of the White Fish Producers Association and a fisherman with three boats sums it up in an amazing mea culpa on behalf of the fishing industry: "This has nothing to do with the CFP or the threat of Spanish invasion. This has more to do with the reality that we have done damage to the stocks," Park told a fishing conference recently in an outbreak of honesty that seems to have swept the industry.

"All the years we were landing black fish or breaking the rules we thought the scientists were wrong in their stock assessments. We thought in our arrogance that we were right and we knew all there was to know.

"Now we hold our heads in shame at what we've allowed to happen and on that issue I have to hold up my hands and say yes - I was probably more guilty than most," he adds.

As the stocks dwindled in the 1980s and the quotas dropped, fishermen in the north-east began landing their catches illegally. They claimed they were breaching a crazy law that was forcing them to dump fish caught in their nets over the side. No one else really saw it like that. By the time the Fishery Protection Agency clamped down on the practice "black fish" had punched a #10 million hole in the Peterhead market and cut the price of legally landed fish at every port in the UK. The stock of fishermen, in the eyes of the public, was much diminished.

In an office above his fish processing factory in Aberdeen harbour, Danny Coupar mulls over Mike Park's confession. "He's right. I've been telling them for the last 10 years that they're f***ing up the seas," says Coupar. "Excuse the emotive language, but it's an emotive subject."

Coupar, one of the largest independent processors, needs 400 boxes of white fish a day to feed our appetite for supermarket fillets. He admits he has taken black fish in the past, if he hadn't it would have gone to competitors, but now he scours the globe for legal stocks.

"We've got options - we could go to the Faroes, to Norway, we can source Alaskan pollock, South Pacific cod from America - but they can only go to the North Sea." So long as consumers want fish the industry will go to the ends of the earth, moving from one endangered species to the next, to keep the supermarkets stocked.

By the time we head back to Peterhead, the afternoon tide and the wind are blowing the North Sea over the harbour wall, drenching the cars parked on the piers.

George Geddes, the skipper of the Scotia, drives a Vauxhall - a choice that has a certain irony in Peterhead this last week. No one here is convinced that the government will bail them out. Fishing is now seen as marginal to the UK economy. Total landings from the UK fleet in 1997 were #622m which is only 0.1% of the nation's GDP. Fishermen feel they are being left to their fate, which is a rush to fish as much as they can before bankruptcy catches up with them.

Geddes would like to see an alternative future. Aged 41, he wants to see another 20 years in the industry, he wants a sustainable future. He is what Coupar describes as one of the young fishermen who can see the writing on the wall unless there are radical changes.

"Fishermen have changed," says Geddes. "We have to, or we'll be left behind in the woodpile, but I think that we've been tarred with the brush of being irresponsible."

He points out the Scottish fishing industry, ahead of other fleets, has adopted square mesh panels in nets which allows smaller fish to successfully escape. It is a commendable, conservation- minded effort. Geddes would go further. "We need to look after the fish so they mature and spawn at least twice before we catch them and maybe 10 years from now we'll be catching the size of fish we want to be catching."

Cod takes four years to mature and another two before it can spawn twice - the first time is not always successful. Geddes knows this more than most, but he seems to be proposing a moratorium on fishing.

Coming from a fisherman, sitting in the wheelhouse of a trawler in Peterhead, home to the most rapacious fishing fleets in the British Isles, it just doesn't sound serious. Geddes insists he is and that most of the skippers in the harbour would agree.

"If you do it in stages you'll take the fishermen along with you. It can't just be thou shalt not. There are people who are going to be hurt, processors that are going to be hurt, but if we're not prepared to do anything then no-one else will."

He goes along with increasing mesh sizes, gradually, and the option, now being seriously considered, of creating no take zones where boats would not be allowed to fish for months or perhaps years.

Temporary closures over spawning grounds already exist, but the industry has already found ways of outsmarting the system. After black fish comes black technology. By law every new boat over 24m must carry a satellite tracking device which betrays its position to the fishing enforcement agencies at any given time. But the Dutch fishing fleet has already devised a means of "ghosting" their satellite image to another area of sea, allowing them to fish in a closed area while appearing to be in another open zone. Scottish fishermen are ready to take up the idea.

"Some people are under severe pressure, with fuel costs and running costs and they'll take bigger risks than black fish," says Geddes. "They'll take risks with safety, and they'll stay out longer with smaller crews."

The trouble, as it always has been, is that most fishermen think that conservation is a good thing, limiting catches are a good thing - for every fisherman except themselves. They do not trust each other any more than they do the politicians and the scientists.

But into this sinking industry a lifeline has been thrown from a very unlikely source. WWF, the panda bear environmentalists, have produced one of the most progressive documents on the fishing industry for many years. The WWF, which has found common cause with Scottish fishermen to save the ocean ecosystem, argue that government money, a lot more government money, has to be invested in the fleet and in recovery programmes now so that there will still be fishermen to take advantage of stocks when (or if) they recover.

"We can avoid a biological catastrophe and pointless human misery," says Malcolm MacGarvin, one of the report's authors. "We either spend the money on a recovery programme or pay the social security bills, the unemployment benefit and the job creation schemes that will be the consequence of failure to act. It's a simple choice."

Along with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, the WWF are preparing to put the case for reforming the CFP so that planning is devolved to a local scale in which fishermen have a stake. They want to get away from the annual crisis negotiations, set long term recovery goals and funds to scrap vessels and pay for lay-up schemes.

MacGarvin, who spent many months talking to fishermen while compiling the report, is more optimistic about recovery than the men of Peterhead, but he knows that he does not feel the same pressures as they do.

"They do not believe that money is going to be available to take the pressure off so they are trying to get as much out of it as possible."

He also recognises that they know who is ultimately to blame for the fishing catastrophe. He retells an anecdote first told to him by a north-east fisherman who phoned home from the boat to tell his 10- year-old son that they had not caught many fish that week. "That's because you've caught them all before dad," said the boy. Even the children know the sins of their fathers.

l See Comment: Seven Days

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.