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House of Lords: UK unprepared for landing obligation
A committee investigation by the UK's House of Lords has found the country's fishing industry remains unprepared for full implementation of the common fisheries policy (CFP)'s landing obligation.
The rules -- designed to put an end to the practice of discarding fish -- have been slowly phased in since 2015, and came into force in full on Jan. 1, 2019.
Despite the long lead-in time, when the committee examined the issue in November and December 2018 they found little evidence of the landing obligation being followed to date, and an almost unanimous view that the UK was not ready for full implementation, said the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee.
"It cannot be right that, five years after legislation is agreed, the UK is in a position where it cannot enforce the law -- both because it does not have the tools to monitor compliance and because doing so could cause significant harm to the fishing industry," the committee wrote as part of its summary.
"The most likely scenario appears to be that discarding will continue, leaving the environmental concerns that prompted the introduction of the new rules unaddressed. It is extremely disappointing that the UK government did not do more during the phased introduction of the landing obligation to make it workable."
Ministers must now use the opportunity created by leaving the EU to put in place the onboard monitoring requirements and changes to quota distribution that could make a discard ban enforceable and effective, it concluded.
At this time it is not known whether the proposed UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement, which includes provision for a transition period until Dec. 31 2020, will be ratified. If it is, EU law will continue to apply in the UK until the end of that transition period. This includes the landing obligation, the committee stated.
At the end of the transition period, or from March 29, 2019 if a deal is not agreed, the UK government could choose to alter or revoke the landing obligation.
In addition, the majority of witnesses to the committee supported the retention of some form of "discard ban", it said. Barrie Deas, from the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said: “There is recognition that we will have a landing obligation or discard ban in some form. We realize that it would be unrealistic to go back to a situation where there was no landing obligation, and we would not want to, but we have to make it workable.”
Jeremy Percy, from the New Under Ten Fishermen’s Association, agreed: “We recognize that we should be encouraged and supported to reduce our discard rate as much as humanly possible."
UK fisheries minister George Eustice told the committee he thought the discard ban and the landing obligation were "right as a point of principle”. Indeed, the government’s fisheries bill, currently before the House of Commons, includes the same objective to eliminate discards as the CFP.
Brexit, and the fact that the UK would resume control of its national waters, gave the government an opportunity to improve how it implements the landing obligation, said fisheries researcher Grant Course. Referring to the current reluctance to enforce the landing obligation with remote electronic monitoring, he said: “This is understandable when the UK is part of the EU and it would have required an EU approach to provide all fishermen with a level playing field."
"However now that we are leaving the EU, we can have our own rules and standards and ensure that any visiting vessels abide by these. There is an opportunity to set the bar high, monitor this effectively and stop other nations continuing to fish without effective monitoring.”
This option is included in the fisheries bill: “[It] makes provision for us to do a number of things, including making it a requirement of a vessel license, whether a British or a foreign vessel, to have certain equipment. It could require cameras on vessels as the price of access to our waters.”
“[It] will give vessels the option to pay a charge to land catch in excess of quota," said Eustice. "This charge will be priced in such a way that it is financially preferable to adopt more sustainable practices and avoidance measures to reduce unwanted bycatch. If vessels choose to pay the charge, they will be able to sell their over quota fish... but will not be subject to further enforcement action."
Deas added that, although the details still had to be worked out, “it is those sorts of things, and creative thinking, embedded in a collaborative approach, that will take us through”.
Percy was more skeptical: “If you are over quota, as far as our understanding goes, you will now be able to sell it on the market for human consumption, but you will be charged an amount of money to ensure that you do not profit from it. That is supposed to provide a disincentive for fishermen to catch more than their quota."
"Unfortunately, that is not the way fishing works. Very often, you cannot determine how much fish is in your net before you dump it on deck. The larger-scale and financially well-off boats will just write that into their business plan, so they will still be able to land more fish than they have quota for, but they will be able to pay the charges. It lacks disincentive for them and discriminates between large and small vessels."
NGO dismay
Our Fish described the report as a "ringing alarm bell”.
"The UK government has failed to deliver one of its most popularly supported policies to end overfishing and restore ocean health, by letting the landing obligation slip into existence over the last five years without any monitoring and or enforcement of the rules," said program director Rebecca Hubbard.
Instead of driving the transition to improved selectivity, better catch data and sustainability that the ban on discards was designed to do, "hundreds of thousands of tons of fish are probably still being wasted and we know even less about what is happening with our public resources at sea”, she continued.
The fear is that the UK government will let its commitment to ocean health fall away in the transition to Brexit -- including by failing to commit to setting annual fishing limits in line with scientific advice -- she said.
Sam Stone, head of fisheries and aquaculture with the Marine Conservation Society, said the organization welcomed the report. He especially backed the idea of remote electronic monitoring systems for all vessels operating in UK waters, which he felt would enable fishing effort to be monitored in a reliable and cost-effective way.
“The Lords report has highlighted that as things stand, we simply don’t know enough about what fish we are taking out of our seas and how much is being discarded. This has serious implications for the health of our fish stocks and our ocean environment and it is disappointing that government is not doing enough to monitor catches."
"MCS is pushing for the new fisheries bill to provide a robust monitoring and enforcement system making use of cost-effective new technology such as cameras on boats. We are very encouraged that the Lords committee has highlighted these concerns which we have been raising with government for a long time and we hope this can be addressed."
Länk: https://www.undercurrentnews.com/2019/02/11/house-of-lords-uk-unprepared-for-landing-obligation/