The situation has never been more catastrophic. If nothing is done there will be no more fishing on either side of the Channel and North Sea after the Brexit. It is urgent to abandon the policies of programmed mutual annihilation and to implement sustainable policies.

It is equally urgent to find an agreement on fisheries with the United Kingdom in order to avoid a calamitous “no deal” for all parties. We are at the twenty-fifth hour. 

#1 Situation

In France, the fishing industry has been devastated by our fault, it is neither the Spanish nor the British who are the cause. Our two large central buying groups have pulled the prices so well from the French fishery, leading to overfishing, that we found ourselves without fish, without shipowners and without fishermen, or so few, barely 6,000. The buying groups had to turn to the Spanish industrialist Pescanova to supply the shelves of our supermarkets.

In the United Kingdom, the situation is different. Overfishing comes from an allocation, made by the Westminster Parliament alone, of the bulk of the quota to industrial fishing to the detriment of small-scale coastal fishing, which represents the bulk of the 8,000 British fishermen. The industrialists, who for the most part are foreign operators having bought quotas from the British, rake without worrying about the consequences, the small ones try to survive.

At the current rate, the state of the stocks in the northeast Atlantic is at risk of a collapse reminiscent of that of Grand Banks cod in the 1970s and 1980s^[i].

#2 Brexit

Faced with Brexit, the European position, confirmed by the high level of overfishing decided on December 17th, 2020, consists of overfishing a little more to compensate the anticipated loss of access to British waters. In this way, the end of the viability of the fishery industry is guaranteed within a little more than ten years by accelerating the fall in stocks and the prospect of programmed collapse. The proposal made to the United Kingdom is that we should stand as it is and that we meet again in ten years time…

Faced with Brexit, the British position is an inconsistent patchwork of contradictory positions. Dover sole is “English” only if historical fishing rights are ignored. Then in order to fish scallops in the Bay of Seine, those same rights are invoked^[ii]. As in Canada in the 80’s, it is expected that there will be a respite for the local fishery due to the exclusion of other countries. As in Canada, the respite is likely to last 5 to 10 years before the bone fire is over.

Fishing policies on both sides of the Channel are ecologically unsustainable, economically unviable, and socially unjust. It is time to change perspective.

#3 An industry in a state of disaster

Given the prohibitive issue of fixed costs: depreciation of vessels, kerosene prices, sailors’ wages, fishing is a low-profit activity where fishermen are often the adjustment variable. The slightest decrease in catches directly affects the income of small fishermen. For deep-sea fishing, the quest for profit maximization pushes to always rake more and sell the bycatch to the salmon farms. With utter disregard for the destruction of the environment and the local communities which are the least of the concerns of a financial fishery that can go and exploit other regions of the world when the European fishing grounds are no longer profitable.

On both sides of the Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea, the chronic trend of overfishing leads us to a complete rethinking of fishing policies as we know them.

#4 Advocacy for sustainable fisheries

The fisheries will only be able to survive if two conditions are met: first, that the stocks are rebuilt and second, that fishing is reserved, as a priority, to the local communities that depend on it.

Scientifically, each fishing area should be taken as a whole. If we rake the seabed by destroying the ecosystems, there can no longer be sustainable fishing. It is impossible to separate a quota for herring from a quota for cod in the North Sea.

A healthy system is productive, a degraded system as today produces little, a destroyed system produces nothing.

Rebuilding a healthy system in the North Sea means rethinking the whole. It is necessary to limit or even prohibit the fishing of certain species such as cod for 5 or 10 years in order to return to a semblance of a normal population… and we will have to preserve the other species on which cod feeds at the same time^[iii].

The species quota policy only makes sense in a protected and healthy environment. It is pointless and ineffective in an environment in the process of extinction. 

The communities that exploit an area form an ecosystem. Fishermen in the English Channel may come from Kent or Cornwall, Normandy or Brittany, they fish one and the same pool of resource. Either they get by together or they sink together.

A British fisherman who catches a fish in the English quota in the English Channel and lands it in Lorient because it is destined for the French market, where he is de facto based, will be an illegal immigrant on January 1, 2021.

The Dutch shipowner who fishes for the herring in a quota that the British sold him in the 1980s, while he rakes up the funds by destroying them, will not be worried. This makes no sense! If his financiers stop investing in his super trawler^[iv], they can invest elsewhere.

For the small fishermen who no longer have enough to survive this is not an option, its their communities and cultures that will be destroyed.

#5 Another distribution

Suppose for a minute that the British quotas are at a threshold of 6. If the British recover their entire catch they hope to double it to 12. Since they will be denied access to European waters in retaliation, the reality will be closer to 9 to 10. Tariffs may reduce them further.

In addition, if the French appetite for mackerel is very low and that for herring very very low, in the United Kingdom the appetite for mackerel is very very low and that for herring zero. The reality is that if we go from a level of 6 to 8, the British fishing industry should be happy to get that far.

And if, as in Canada, the United Kingdom continues to overfish in the euphoria of “reclaiming its fishing grounds”, it is likely that in 5 to 10 years’ time the resource will have been halved or more. That is, the index that would fall to 3 to 4, barely more than half the current level.

Why this threshold of 6? Because 6% is the quota allocated to the inshore artisanal fisheries, made by the Westminster Parliament alone, as opposed to 94% of the overall UK quota for the industrial fisheries.

Yet this 6% represents the bulk of the 8,000 British fishermen. Going from 6 to 8 at the expense of other European fishermen is clearly not the way forward.

Economically, a greater share should be guaranteed to the fishermen themselves, for example the FOB price could be 40% of the selling price to the final consumer. Our IT systems know how to do it for VAT, they could as well do it for fishing. This would encourage short and sustainable chains.

The temporary scarcity of the resource will lead to an increase in price. The cumulation of the two, higher price and bigger share, can make it possible to compensate for a drastic reduction in quotas. When the situation is restored, prices will fall on much higher volumes, as the example of Norwegian cod has proven, so fishermen will maintain their income or increase it. 

Politically, we must refuse to allow ourselves to be trapped in the deadly alternative between the European position that boils down to “Let’s fish as if nothing is happening, and in ten years there won’t be a problem because there won’t be any fish left“, and the British position that boils down to “Let’s fish, we Brits and we alone, all our fish, to the point of extinction in five to ten years, and be done with it“.

The only reasonable choice is a global management of the resource with a total or partial moratorium on certain species for 5 to 10 years and the total and definitive prohibition of the most destructive practices such as deep trawls.

We can then agree to rethink quotas based on community needs, sustainability, and history, when, in 5 or 10 years, the stocks have recovered^[v]. Agreeing on the elements that will be taken into account can be done today, the parameters are all known. Even agreeing on the size of the Zeebruge fishing vessels with the right to fish in perpetuity in UK waters as granted by Charles III.

Socially, the fishing industry should be considered as an industry in crisis. This conversion must be accompanied as it has been done for coal or steel. No, we must do even better than we have done.

It is possible, the ESF is there for that, the credits earmarked for France are under-used by 90%. Let’s take charge of the transition and reconversion in the Channel without having to vote new credits, by relying on the existing ones. Let’s protect the communities on both sides of the Channel or elsewhere…

The tools exist, let’s use them.

Instead of opposing British and French fishermen, let’s help them. By doing so, we can still save the fishing industry in Europe, and who knows, even an agreement at the end of Brexit.

^[i] Until the 1950s, cod had been fished 500,000 tons/year for centuries. With the advent of modern techniques, it reached 1,500,000 tons/year in the 1970s. Overfishing led to a drop in volumes. In the 1980s, Canada reserved exclusive access. They began to fish 500,000 t from a stock reduced by 90%. This led to a complete collapse. The current level is 1% of the initial volume !

^[ii] The British government claims the right to fish them even when the French want to limit fishing to 6 months per year to preserve/recover the stock. The French rightly equate fishing outside those dates with poaching. This had already led the government, of which Johnson was a part, to threaten to send the Navy just two years ago, alas!

^[iii] Scientists are now familiar with the stocks of the main species, but not all of them. The problem is that when they give a maximum quota value for a stock, from 20% to 30% depending on the species, to maintain the stock at the current level, this figure is taken as the minimum basis for fishing. Under these conditions, over-fishing never stops.

And yet, as the management of skrei cod in Norway has proven, setting a value significantly lower than this threshold allows the stock to rebuild and, ultimately, to increase the volume fished without endangering the stock.

^[iv] The volume fished by this trawler alone represents 24% of the British quota for all species.

^[v] The United Kingdom criticizes certain advantageous quotas, such as the 80% quota granted to the French for cod in the Celtic Sea. But the ridiculously low overall quota of 1,600 tons in 2019 only reached 1,400 tons due to a lack of fish. If, after 5 to 10 years of an active stock rebuilding policy, the stock reached 5 times the current level, on the way  to growi to 10 times (and still below the historical highs), it is obvious that reducing the French quota from 80 to 60% and upping the English quota from 20 to 40% would be very different. The reduction on the French side would result in an increase in catches by a factor of 3.75, and on the English side by a factor of 10 !