It’s behind you!

Civitas, 16 December 2009

The EU has finalised the 2010 deal on its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) setting the total allowable catches (TACs) to dictate the amount of fish which can legally be caught in the EU waters next year.

The surprisingly rapid negotiations concluded after just 2 days – in years past they have stretched on and on… For the first time (under the Lisbon Treaty), MEPs played an equal role with national Fisheries Ministers in the CFP negotiations (however MEPs still had no say in deciding the crucial TACs/fish quotas).

There is always a loser in EU fisheries policy. Balancing environmental and economic considerations is a seemingly unattainable task; the bigger a fisherman’s annual catch the greater his financial reward, but more efficient modern methods have resulted in ‘overfishing’ in EU waters, which has left fish stocks dangerously low.

For this reason, in 2010 the EU has decided to reduce its fishing quotas for the majority of species by 20 – 25% (e.g. haddock, sole and cod) to allow fish stocks a chance to recover, and to only “cautiously increase” quotas for a minority of species (e.g. hake).

In an attempt to lessen the hardship for fishermen, Britain (along with Denmark and Germany) proposed a new deal to allow an extra 5% “allowable catch” if fishermen agree to fit 3 CCTV cameras to each of their boats. The cameras will serve a dual purpose: firstly to achieve what the UK fisheries Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, termed “sound science” to monitor the state of fish stock, and secondly to ensure that fishermen don’t illegally dump unwanted fish back into the sea (which further damages aquatic-ecosystems).

The EU Commission accepted this proposal yesterday. So will the spirit of Bentham’s Panopticon prison system mean that pantomime hecklings of “It’s behind you!” will continue to be heard on fishing vessels in the New Year? (Bentham designed a system of prison cells built around a central ‘warden’s tower’ to ensure that prisoners didn’t know when they were being watched – thus convicts would believe they were being observed at all times and therefore learn to regulate their behaviour internally, based on the assumption that bad behaviour would always be witnessed, and punished.)

The new CFP deal will not be enacted until troubled EU-Norway negotiations are resolved (annual talks on shared fishing zones recently broke down). There will also be a complete overhaul of the EU’s fishery policy by 2013 at the latest. However, expectations for genuine reform are low after this week’s negotiations confirmed that the 2002 reform of the CFP has not enabled sustainable fish stocks or the survival of fishing communities across the EU. Whilst the fishery commissioner, Joe Borg, claimed to have “done our utmost to lessen the short-term burden for the fisheries sector”, there will always be a loser in the EU’s CFP.