Fishing about and about fishing
THE FAEROESE LECTURE
Mr. Chairman, Friends,
Coming from the far end of the blue Mediterranean, I can hardly hope to carry much wisdom on the cold Atlantic. But, before commenting on the assessment, management, and fishing operations, and concluding with some very tentative recommendations, allow me to set a sort of background. I'll start with some definitions, and my apologies to the experts here for what may sound to them trivia.
Definitions:
Fisheries management must be based on fisheries ecology. Ecology is the economics of nature and it deals with the exchange of matter and energy within and among ecosystems. It is a very complex and hardly exact branch of science. But, while in economics we know the values of currencies, costs, prices, and interests, in the "commerce" that takes place in ecosystems those values constantly change and affect each other in many ways, and we don't even know all the factors in the game.
Ecosystem is the definite space in which all those processes take place, and in the ocean, we have the marine ecosystem.
Fishery ecosystem is a marine ecosystem in which fishermen, fish, and environment meet and interact. When I'm talking about fishery, I mean the process in which fishing people exploit fish-stocks within fishery ecosystems. Those three are bound together in every fishery, and influenced by such external factors, as people's cultures, markets, technology, and logistics on one hand, and fishery-independent natural, biotic and non-biotic trends and fluctuations on the other.
N.Atlantic issue
For decades, the North Atlantic fishing grounds have been subject to the world's most extensive and most expensive institutional and governmental research, management, and enforcement systems with the greatest number of functionaries per square mile of water surface. Nonetheless, here occurred the world's greatest washouts of fisheries management, although not all N.Atlantic stocks are badly off. For example, Norway says that its cod stocks are fine. So seem to be the Faeroese ones.
Nevertheless, from the coasts of Canada and New England all the way to the North Sea groundfish have been in trouble. Have the EC and North American scientists and managers found the reasons, analyzed the failures and learned the lessons? May be they still work on it, but in the meantime inertia still prevails. So, what have we got?
ASSESSMENT
Initially, fishery science monitored environmental conditions, and studied fish biology, ecology, behaviour, and environment, assuming that knowledge and understanding of their interaction was a condition for rational management. All this required frequent and prolonged research cruises, and other efforts and both, human and financial resources. Also, personal dedication.
Enter fish population dynamics and computer models. They offered a convenient and comfortable alternative, and in many countries have become the main stock assessment tool.
The basic assumption was that the amount of commercial-size fish in a stock equals the amount residue from last year plus those recruited this year, less the amount that was fished out (fishing mortality), and less those that died from predation and other natural causes (natural mortality).
This concept was elaborated into several mathematical models by Baranov, Russel, Beverton and Holt, Schaefers, Cushing and others. Used to produce estimates of stock and "maximum sustainable yield" it became the gist of the stock assessment methodology, and "the best available science", but in most cases insufficient, even where supplemented by survey fishing and echo-surveys.
Most models consider fish stocks in isolation from their ecosystem; hardly comprise non-fishing variables, such as interrelations with other species in the system, environmental changes, and pollution, and their true-time effects on abundance, natural mortality, availability, and vulnerability of fish populations. They are highly sensitive to guessed and "guesstimated" inputs, and to inadequate and unreliable data on catch size, composition, and capture area. Whether the simplest or the most sophisticated, multi-species ones, the models don't consider non-fishing data, in spite of claims that those are implied in both recruitment and natural mortality figures, for they're reliable in only a few very fisheries.
Species with narrow temperature preference limits, especially during spawning when egg development and hatching are subject to thermal anomalies that delay or hasten spawning and displace spawning grounds. Survival of larvae and juveniles depends on the availability of the right food, at the right place and time, as well as on the rate of predation.
Veteran consultant David Thomson wrote that the 30-year "disaster of the EU Common Fisheries Policy" is partly explained by not subjecting its science to peer reviews, and by failing to challenge false assumptions.
But, in my view, one reason for inadequate science surviving so long is that the "peer reviewing" of its presumptions and recommendations has been done by scientists coming from the same discipline and prevailing school of thought as the authors. Thus, statistical modellers, rather than scientists who may be critical of the whole methodology, review stock assessments. Chris Finlayson, the author of "Fishing for Truth" wrote recently: "Can we accept that we are always formally in error in our assessments of states of complex, open-ended systems - but in an unknown direction and magnitude? This is an anathema (hard to swallow) to rationalist/technocratic bureaucracies".
Dr. Gary Sharp, a distinguished fishery ecologist specialising in physiological oceanography, wrote once that during the 1950s and 1960s "an ambitious 'priesthood' of mathematically trained statisticians... ...many without sufficient knowledge of the basics of environmental and species interactions or physiological ecology", gained predominance of the fishery science. They shoved aside more empirical scientists, who wouldn't just sit at the computers, but also go to the docks and to sea, and adhered to their methods as to a religion. This has been for decades the basis for fisheries management in the northern Atlantic, while communication between fisheries analysts and fishing industry has declined and consequently so has data quality."
Data from the fisheries are often unreliable for several reasons:
1. Fishermen find themselves in a sort of Catch-22 situation: when they report true catches - their reporting is often leading to quota or effort cuts; when they under-report  the results are similar.
2. Research and survey vessels fish routinely and, because of the dynamics of fish behaviour and migrations, apart from a few sluggish species, may miss fish concentrations. The same goes for echosounding surveys, which apart from their inherent inexactness, cannot be everywhere at the same time.
3. Research-survey vessels use "standard" outdated gear, not adjusted to changes in fish behaviour and location, and may misrepresent the actual state of the stock.
NOW, HOW IMPORTANT ARE NON-FISHING FACTORS
Ignoring natural environmental factors is ridiculous. For example, in its Global Environment Outlook Year Book 2003 UNEP says that marine dead zones, which now number nearly 150 worldwide, are a greater menace than overfishing. According to scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in the US, "oxygen depletion is likely to become the keystone impact for the 21st Century, replacing the 20th Century keystone of overfishing." Some of the dead zones depleted of oxygen extend up to 27,000 square miles, afflicting the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and the Baltic, Black, Yellow, and Adriatic Seas, and the Gulf of Thailand, and Yellow Sea.
Dr. M. de L. Brooke, Curator of Birds at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, in a recent paper in the "Biology Letters", conservatively estimates that the world's seabirds consume 70 million tonnes of food, close to the 80 M mt global fisheries landings. If we add to this figure the consumption of fish by marine mammals, fishermen may catch perhaps only one third of what is annually taken off the fishable stocks.
Estimates put the amount of fish eaten by marine mammals worldwide at more than 800 million tonnes annually, or roughly 10 times the worldwide ocean fish harvest, says Kristin Kaschner, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver
According to consultant Jon Kristjansson, some tagging studies and estimates from stocks under moratorium indicate that the natural mortality is much higher than the figures routinely used in the models. Also, catches in many areas are under-reported or vastly underestimated.
Dr.Gary Sharp, has been talking and writing for years of the crucial influence of climatic and oceanic processes on fish populations and calling for "truly interdisciplinary approaches to aquatic ecology and marine fisheries research".
Recently, similar voices came also from the direction of ICES in an article by Dr. Mikko Heino of the Bergen Institute of Marine Research: "Does fishing cause genetic evolution in fish stocks?" Apart of the genetics with which I'll deal later on, Heino raises questions that have been asked by "dissident" scientists and many fishermen for decades. He writes that assessment models should consider not just single stocks but also their interactions with the wider ecosystem, and that "models that consider fish stocks in isolation from their ecosystem have clearly had their day", which in my translation boils down to: they've never been any good..
Now  writes Heino - ICES is shifting to ecosystem approach, which includes the effects of climate and oceanography and of changes in fish food supply, especially at the sensitive larval stage that are related to the physical environment - the variability in sunlight, winds, and currents. This new knowledge leads to meaningful, operational predictions on the future levels of recruitment based on both existing stock size (the traditional approach) and knowledge of the climatic regime operating."
A SHIFT MUST COME
Nonetheless, N.Atlantic management still prescribes fishing levels on the basis of such stocks assessments. But, the reality is being more and more recognized that the conventional methods produce flawed assessment of the stock and hence flawed management steps. While most scientists keep working within the context of old ideas, they know that soon new paradigms would replace the old less suitable ones.The new fisheries management system would be alert for the follies of the ever-changing environment, and look at the state of stocks on the background of climatic fluctuations and events and of other non-fishing factors.
FROM ASSESSMENT TO MANAGEMENT
Dr. John Caddy, who is a prominent fishery biologist, explained how a time lag of a year or so occurs before scientists perceive a change in the state of a stock. It may take another year till such "discovery" is analyzed and processed into recommendations. The managers then discuss the recommendations and consequent steps with various interested parties. The last time lag lasts until the industry implements those rules. Thus, till the management's new trend was implemented, the natural fluctuation that had generated this chain of reactions may now be over, or even move the opposite way. The result is that the management steps may make things worse, or at best amplify the fluctuations.
In any case, what the managers actually do with the recommendations they get, and what are the steps they eventually decide on, is a function of the political persuasion and social structure of the advisory and the decision-making establishment.
FISHERY MANAGEMENT:
Rational fisheries management is a problem area where the effects of environmental dynamics, and pollution combine with economically viable overfishing. Yes, there's such an animal. "Economically-viable overfishing" is the product of increasing demand both for high-quality and industrial fishes with resulting increases of prices compensating for reduced yields. Hence, as Gary Sharp once wrote, "maybe the best way to regulate fisheries is to regulate at the market place."
Fishery management aiming at maintaining a certain level of catches can select from a whole catalogue of legal, regulatory, technical, and economic measures. But, whatever are its objectives, and whatever policies it is following, and whether it eventually improves or hurts stocks, all it can manage is people and hardly anything else.
The means it chooses determine how benefits from the fishery are distributed among the fishing industry, the fishing people, and their communities. By allocating fishing rights and controlling fishing effort, the management can shift such benefits from one sector to another, sometimes irreversibly. Transferability of boat or gear licenses, days at sea, quotas etc., depending on conditions attached, may or may not lead to similar consequences.
Most fisheries policies are designed to give preference either to sustainability of coastal communities, or to privatization or quasi-privatization of fish resources. Some try intermediate steps. In the first case, a fishery would be managed through input control, or for example, through regional or community quotas, within which the fishing community, organization or, as they do it in Japan, a cooperative, would control the fishing effort. In the second case, it'll be managed through TACs, & ITQs, under free market system.
ITQs, for example, must in the long run cause concentration of fishing rights/quotas in the hands of fewer and stronger, and bring about social dislocations. This works in favour of large owners and corporations, at the expense of smaller individual owners-operators, family businesses, and their crews. ITQs may also improve financial indices of individual owners and large companies that succeed to stay in business. In some cases they may be good, and in others - bad for fish stocks.
Where coastal communities with owners-operators of small to middle-size fishing vessels on one part, and major individual owners and fleet-owning companies on the other, compete over the same resources and/or fishing grounds, they, respectively, hate or love ITQs.
THE SYSTEM:
In the northern countries the management routine works very well: (data are collected, models employed, stock assessments attained, TACs produced, advice passed on, rules enacted). The problems start when it comes to fishery ecosystems and fishing people, because often neither the nature nor the industry comply.
It mostly happens where the management is out of step with natural trends, and its blunders affect large numbers of fishing vessels and whole populations of fisherfolk. When fishermen perceive regulations as illogical, preposterous, or non-equitable, and the underlying science erroneous, they will beat the rules: cheat, poach, land or sell over-the-side "black" fish, and, under limited quotas, discard marketable fish to make space for more valuable ones. Enforcement under such conditions becomes unfeasible or so expensive as to be impractical. Nobody would admit anything, but the data for management become remote from reality, either way. The management is failing, but to be left with something to manage, is taking draconian steps, often shooting in all directions. Hasn't it been happening for years under the CFP?
Many of such situations could be avoided, if scientists would be more attentive to what they call: "fishermen's anecdotal information", and if managers would be less bureaucratic and more flexible, and stop treating different diseases with one single medicine.
Fishery Management, Inc.
During the last few decades of the 20th century, fisheries management and its administration worldwide has become "Big Business". It justifies, not too accurately, that without employing thousands of scientists, technicians, bureaucrats, and enforcement officers, fishermen would deplete fish resources. As any large organisation, it's got a vested interest in its own perpetuation and expansion. Whether blamed for inadequacy or hailed for good performance both, green lobbying and benefiting economic interests help it to gain more and more funding and power.
OPERATIONS:
Management affects fishing operations in technical-logistic as well as in economic terms. It usually impedes and in extreme cases stops fishing operations completely on some grounds, or for some species, or dislodges fishermen from fishing altogether.
But, first at all, management is affecting operations by regulating the sort and amount of gear used: length of nets and longlines, number of pots, etc. Almost everywhere, it influences the selectivity of the gear through regulating minimum mesh and hook size. The purpose and the conventional wisdom are to let the younger fish escape and grow, before they're caught again. The result is that for years and decades fishermen have been taking off the stock mainly the larger fish.
This practice is now questioned. A few years ago a study showed that many of the fish that escape through meshes are injured to various degrees, mainly by losing scales and, weakened by parasites and diseases, they die or become an easy prey. Obviously, the more hardy species proved more resistant to injuries.
Also the American sport fishermen's custom of releasing hooked fish upon an assumption that such fish would survive and, therefore, should not be considered as a part of the catch quotas is now questioned, because the survival of the released fish is doubtful.
But, the most serious arguments against selective fishing have been coming from two scientists from Iceland and one from Holland. The two are Jonas Bjarnasson, and Jon Kristjansson, and the other Niels Daan. Although from different points of view, they all came to the same conclusion that sustained creaming off the larger and more prolific individuals brings about stock impoverishment, which reduction of quotas and even moratoria would not cure in a foreseeable future.
According to Dr. Daan, when the biggest fish are caught off, more small fish survive, especially in case of cannibalistic fishes, which is why the stock size composition deteriorates.
According to Dr. Bjarnasson, the selective fishing makes the remaining fish in the stock smaller and produces individuals with inferior reproductive qualities. Because of the occurring genetic change the surviving fish tend to grow slower and mature sooner.This forces them to spend more and more of their energy on sexual products and spawning activity at the expense of their own body energy and building. They're more vulnerable to predation and their natural mortality increases. In almost all cases of stock collapse in the North Atlantic these symptoms have been present, but mostly ignored by the official science.
According to Dr. Kristjansson, the problem with selective removal of groundfish in the North Sea is not overfishing but rather underfishing. The net result is a population of hungry fish with stagnant growth and small size at maturity. For example, in an area where the 99- year class of haddock is the strongest for 30 years, the fish are small and thin - starving. They were all mature last spring, but almost stopped growing. Cod of the same size are also thin, starving. Reducing the fishery only makes things worse.
Another of his findings is that when the breeding stock size is high recruitment is low, and vice versa. Hence, recruitment is in phase with the growth rate i.e. with availability of food and with low breeding stock size.
Recently, similar voices came also from the direction of ICES, where Dr. Heino in the above-cited article like Bjarnasson writes of genetic changes in selectively fished stocks.
Different management systems have different effects on fishing operations. Days-at-sea and quota regimes are affecting both their intensity and character. The infamous "gold rush" practices have been the product of TACs and over-capacity of fleets.
Rules may make a fishery more or less safe, or direct fishermen to or away from certain fishing grounds. ITQs may reduce safety risks, as, reportedly, in Alaska. But, economically unfeasible quota or effort limitations may cause skippers of small vessels to venture from coastal grounds to waters too distant and dangerous for their size and seaworthiness. Also, if they must to catch the whole quota to assure further entitlements, skippers may decide to stay at sea under unfavourable and dangerous weather conditions. The same happens where hired skippers are afraid of losing their jobs, as e.g., in the US East coast dredger-fleet, where non-operator owners exert pressure on hired skippers to satisfy market needs, market, rather than according to sea conditions.
Management by fishing quotas may distribute fishing effort more evenly on the time scale, but shrinking ITQs may force small owners to cease operations, rent out or sell their quotas and, eventually, their boats. Where quotas are too small, or bycatch of non-quota commercial species considerable, honest fishing operations may deteriorate into all sorts of illicit activities.
Where the fishing capacity more or less fits the stocks size, limited or closed access regimes, make it possible to run the fishery with minimum regulation - or none at all. Fishermen can operate in harmony with weather conditions and market situations, and to choose their fishing time, grounds and target species according to operational convenience. Nonetheless, e.g. during ebb periods, such fisheries can be additionally regulated by various effort restrictions that are set in ecological harmony with the fishery, as for example, to protect spawning fish. Running such regimes jointly with fishermen, assures high compliance levels.
Recently, the Royal Society of Edinburgh said that control of fish stocks had to be returned to individual countries, and Mr.Tony Blair called the UK to give a lead in reforming the Common Fisheries Policy - by managing fish stocks on a regional level. Similar views expressed Davis Thomson, a veteran international consultant from Scotland, in a report submitted to the UK government.
This is right approach, for different fisheries may have similar fish stocks but differ in fishing grounds, people, industry, markets, etc., and vice versa. Greece is not Spain, the Faeroes fisheries may have more in common with the Shetlands than with Denmark, England is not Scotland, and even in Scotland, East and West are different.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
Let me wrap up this presentation with some conclusions and recommendations.
Conclusions
1. Fishery management is about maintaining the production of fish and the well-being of fish producers at sustainable levels, if not always at high levels. It must prevent depletion of commercial fish stocks, while conserving bio-diversity and endangered species.
2. Good assessment of the desired level of production (expressed either in the terms of input or output, or a combination of both) worked out together with the fishing sector is necessary for successful management. Stock assessment is desirable, but only where science is able to produce such assessment. "The best available" is not necessarily adequate science.
3. The present methodology of managing multi-species fisheries by single species, while keeping the level of a multi-species fishery according to the state of the most depleted one is flawed and ineffective.
4. Fisheries management is all about people. People are all it can manage, and people are those who either enjoy or suffer from its consequences, which may include depletion of fish stocks. Management won't work, if perceived by fishing people as erroneous, wrong, unjust, etc. The Scottish website FISHING UPDATE had a poll as to whether skippers should comply when they consider governments rules "stupid". Almost 40% ticked "no".
5. Choice of management strategy (by the authorities in charge) is in most cases political. Governments' two basic strategies are: (1) favouring the fishing people and their communities, and: (2) favouring larger and financially more efficient owners and large corporations. Both strategies may eventually achieve similar fish yields, but each at different social and economic costs.
6. Within each strategy various technical/technological means can be adapted. Means criticised as based on wrong science and assumptions, must be reviewed by truly independent experts.
7. Introduction of marketable quotas is leading almost infallibly to shifting fishing rights from small to big and to their concentration in the hands of a few. This may be temporarily retarded by restrictive regulations, such as that the quota owner must be on board during fishing, or as in the Alaska, Bering Sea and Aleutian fisheries, where quota limits are: for sablefish - 1 % and for halibut - 1.5 %. My prediction: in won't last.
8. So far, the EU's Fisheries Policy has failed to protect either fish stocks or fishermen.
Recommendations
1. In every fishery the present management system should be seriously reviewed jointly with the industry. Disputable assessment and management methodologies, incompatible with fishermen's experience, judgment and common sense, ought to be challenged by the industry, which may consider to call up it own scientists and, if necessary, litigate.
2. Fishery science should work on design and experiment with holistic models comprising ecological, physical, and production factors. Although a very tall order, it should be embraced by both, the governments and the industry. Even if not sufficient for stock assessment, they'll enable better understanding of the system important for setting management targets.
3. Fishery management strategies should be tailored to distinct fisheries, areas, or even communities. They can be effort controlled, or based on county, island, or community quotas, with internal effort control by the communities or industry. Atlantic fisheries managers should look up to the Norwegian and Faeroese results.
4. Managing authorities should introduce catch and/or effort-capacity targets to the industry, but work out solutions jointly. The share of the industry in financing fisheries research and management should not exceed its share in the decision-making mechanism.
5. Where it suits local/regional conditions limited access and "MBYs guiding principle" should be considered. Accordingly, in inshore and coastal waters, preference should be given to artisanal and small-scale fisheries, and farther offshore to middle-scale fishing. International and distant waters that cannot be safely and feasibly fished by the above, can be fished by large-scale industrial fleets.
6. To maintain coastal fishing communities, their cultures, and fisheries, any form of resource privatisation should be avoided and fisheries managed by input (effort) control. Where feasible, limited or closed access should be considered, based on the fishing pressure that existed when catches were more or less stable for a long period. Excess capacities can be left to wither till the desired level is reached. Where appropriate, fish sanctuaries can be set up to release fishing pressure on certain stocks. There should be no more need for any output controls.
7. The industry should play an active role in mobilizing fishing people, communities, and organizations, to launch and participate in efforts to reduce pollution from coastal, offshore and upstream sources, to minimize destruction of coastal and marine habitats, and to restore them wherever possible.
8. Fishing industry should organize internationally toward reducing stock-depleting competition, and representing common interests at international and world bodies and conferences. In view of differing interests, separate organizations may need to be set up by the different sectors: small-scale, middle-scale and large-scale fisheries.
So, what have We got?
We've got science that needs revision;
We've got unaccounted for factors;
We've got a flawed management methodology that is perverting fishing operations; and
We've got a need for shedding and replacing some petrified concepts.
We also need a fishing industry that knows how to resist being browbeaten by official science and hyper-green campaigners;
We need cooperation with non-dogmatic science and economics; and
We need more intra and international cooperation and co-ordination among fishermen and among their industries, so as to minimize conflicts with the overall objectives of sustaining not only resources, but entire fishing cultures.