A BAN on discards has long been seen as necessary if fish stocks are to recover and the long-term future of one of our mainstay industries is to be secured. Some fishermen may not have liked it at first but, deep down, most saw the necessity and have played their part in making it work.
However, a ban is difficult to monitor if is not effectively policed and that, according to WWF Scotland, is precisely the situation that exists. The number of boats carrying cameras has halved since the scheme was introduced and it is thought that fewer than one per cent of fishing trips are monitored. This comes after an incentive scheme offering additional quota for North Sea cod was ended.
Not surprisingly, conservationists are worried. As for the fishermen themselves, they as much as anyone else dislike throwing dead fish back into the sea. The Catch 22 for them has always been that landing unwanted fish of lesser financial value counted against their boats’ quotas. The fishermen’s perception that the Common Fisheries Policy in general was micro-managing them to death has not helped.
However, it remains to be seen how pouring Brexit onto those troubled waters will help. It is difficult to find anybody in government, or even in the industry, who knows what is going to happen. As with Brexit generally, a plethora of legal agreements will have to be renegotiated or created anew.
Quotas, at any rate, are unlikely to be discarded, regardless of the powers that come back to Britain and however much these are devolved.
That would undo all of the work done already in rebuilding stocks, besides which rules agreed with other countries sharing open-sea fishing grounds will still have to be followed.
Discards will still be deemed undesirable and, until the industry’s hope of developing more selective types of fishing gear comes to fruition, more effective monitoring will have to take place.
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