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Fishermen call for end to slaughter caused by EU net laws
By Charles Clover and Richard North
The Telegraph
18th October 2004
The Fisheries Council meets in Luxembourg today and the British fisheries minister Ben Bradshaw is due to raise the issue.
The problem was graphically illustrated when The Telegraph watched as Phil Dell, a skipper from Fleetwood, risked prosecution to show us and the shadow fisheries minister, Owen Paterson, the devastation being caused in the plaice grounds of the eastern Irish Sea.
Mr Dell had already spent 15 days showing government scientists that around 90 per cent of fish caught are thrown over the side dead as "discards" because of the nets the EU says must be used.
However, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has done nothing about the issue since it was raised at the beginning of the year.
The root cause of the problem is EU regulations, set by ministers last December, that say fishermen must use nets with 80mm mesh and not 110mm mesh - which is usually used to catch cod - or forfeit five days a month at sea.
Mr Dell took his 75ft twin-rig trawler, Kiroan, out to the fishing grounds a few miles off Fleetwood at our request to demonstrate the extent of "discarding".
The Kiroan shot its 80mm nets at 2.20am on Friday morning and hauled for the first time at 5.30am. The net came up bursting with tiny juvenile plaice, way below the minimum landing size of 27cm (10.6in). The net also contained lesser spotted dogfish, jellyfish, gurnards and a single lobster.
When they were sorted, some 95 per cent of the fish had to go back, dead, over the side. Mr Dell repeated his trawl at Mr Paterson's request - with the same result.
Mr Paterson, who has just returned from examining how fish stocks have been managed back to recovery in Iceland and New England, said: "It is totally incomprehensible that sane human beings are doing this.
"It is an absolute scandal. You could hardly believe it - thousands of baby plaice peeping out of the net.
"This could not happen in Iceland, the Faroes, or New England. If a skipper runs into juveniles in Iceland he is obliged to phone in and the authorities close the fishery within two hours and broadcast it on the radio."
In New England, where huge closed areas have been established on Georges Bank for the recovery of cod and yellowtail flounder, fishermen were enthusiastically using 6.5in (165mm) mesh to catch only the largest adult cod, he said.
In the EU, where there is no local management of fisheries and technical conservation methods have never been favoured by the Commission, decisions take a year to be reviewed.
Mr Dell duly shot a trawl with a 110mm net which came up only two thirds full with larger fish. Between 10 and 20 per cent of these, mostly lesser spotted dogfish, had to be discarded.
Mr Dell said: "Last week we had 1,000 40kg [88lb] boxes of discards. And that's only us. The fleet is 10 ships. It's terrible. We've got to carry on slaughtering. We can work the 110mm nets, but DEFRA will take five fishing days a month off us if we do. We can't afford to give them up."
Mr Dell, 50, says that since the cod vanished from the eastern Irish Sea, the fleet targets groundfish, or flatfish, 12 months of the year, hence the devastation.
"Until last year, the fleet used "riddlers" - as 110mm mesh nets are called - to riddle out the smaller plaice. But now they are throwing away next year's catch, just to stay in business."
Fishermen are calling for EU ministers to halt the "insane" slaughter of thousands of tons of small fish at sea as a result of perverse European Union regulations.
Last December's council of fisheries ministers banned carrying a 110mm net as well as an 80mm net because they believed that 110mm mesh would be used to catch cod, which is overfished.
Since then the local DEFRA officer has taken up the fishermen's case, but with no effect.
Mr Dell approached Mr Bradshaw last January when he visited Fleetwood, but he has yet to come up with a solution.
Mr Paterson has received a letter from DEFRA saying that the problem will not be solved until this December's meeting of fisheries ministers, by which time the plaice season, which ends in November, will be over.
Meanwhile, powerful Belgian beam trawlers, which have 2,013 tons of quota for Dover sole in the Irish Sea, compared with the Fleetwood fleet's nine tons, continue to plough the bottom, discarding over 90 per cent of what they catch in order to catch a few, highly prized Dover sole.
Where they have been, fishermen say, the bottom is dead.
Mr Dell showed us a piece from their 80mm nets, each strand 6mm thick and rigid. Nothing can get through. With a 110mm net, however, you cannot catch sole - the fish curl themselves up to escape. He believes the choice of net size is political - to accommodate the Belgians.
Mr Paterson said: "You cannot run a fishery like this, ignoring all the lessons from elsewhere in the world. A wooden, obtuse, unbending bureaucracy is responsible for massacring a perfectly sustainable resource."
A DEFRA spokesman held out hope that Mr Bradshaw would reconsider and try to take some action today.
She said: "The rules on mesh size are the same for all EU vessels. The current Common Fisheries Policy does allow for emergency powers [to close fisheries which are catching too many juveniles] under the EU umbrella.
"Ben Bradshaw, the fisheries minister, is hoping to raise the matter at the Fisheries Council this week."
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