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Minister agrees large industrial companies must be brought to heel
Research is ongoing into alternatives
to industrial trawling.
Photo © P Johnson
UNITED KINGDOM
13th February 2003
Minister agrees large industrial companies must be brought to heel - 13th February 2003
Scottish Deputy Rural Minister Allan Wilson has said action is necessary to protect the North Sea fish stocks food source – the target of industrial fishing by Danish trawlers.
Banff and Buchan SNP MSP Stewart Stevenson claimed he had won the support of the minister during a meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Rural Development Committee.
Mr Stevenson told the Rural Development Committee that the Strategic Framework for Scottish Aquaculture stipulated that Scotland would have “a sustainable, diverse, competitive and economically viable aquaculture industry”.
And this meant tackling the problem of Danish industrial fishing.
Mr Wilson said that he agreed “in large part” with Mr Stevenson’s fundamental point, which had “concentrated my mind and the minds of the working group.”
Mr Wilson added: “For the industry to be sustainable in the long term, we must address the sustainability of its feed stock; that is a fundamental issue.
“A wide range of research and other activities is being generated largely by the Executive, in concert with colleagues in different parts of the world. We want to ensure that we can produce sustainable feed stocks for an expanded level of aquacultural production, and that that does not threaten the current stocks of sand eels and the like, which provide the majority of feed stocks.
“That is a major challenge, which the strategy document recognises; indeed, it is globally recognised. A range of research is also going on into alternative foodstuffs.”
Mr Stevenson earlier told the committee that a feed sustainability study pointed to the real difficulties in the total ecology of the industry.
He added: “The large majority of feed stock is derived from industrial fisheries and, as we know, in the North sea in particular, the Danes are extracting something in the order of 1.5 million tonnes per annum of sandeel, pout, and other smaller species.
“In the document, the minister says that after the European seafoods workshop in April 2003, we shall receive information on global aquaculture feed supplies. However, are we in line for any support-at long last-to eradicate the pernicious industrial fisheries that are so damaging to the wider wild fish stocks in the North Sea? Can the minister give us any hope that the Danes and the industrial companies behind their fisheries-a very small number of very large industrial companies-will finally be brought to heel?
“Can he at the same time offer us a way forward for an increasingly important aquaculture industry?”
By Peter Johnson
FIS Europe
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