Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.07.2011, Blaðsíða 17

Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.07.2011, Blaðsíða 17
16 The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 9 — 2011 fishing| Mackerel Pictured: lots of cod. The headline says 'mackerel', yes, but cod are also mentioned in the article. Furthermore, that picture looks really cool. How could we not have used it? mAckeReL mAyhem ANd The uNhoLy TRiANGLe The immediate result was unemploy- ment and emigration, until Iceland’s fishermen instead turned to cod to keep themselves fishing. It was the end of an era. Overfish- ing, that easily bandied phrase, is wide- ly blamed for the herring’s collapse, but in hindsight, fishing was probably just one of several factors, that include a shift in sea temperatures, that was probably crucial to the herring’s disap- pearance. But the herring came back, appear- ing in force in the 1990s and things appear to have come full circle as the Atlanto-Scandian herring stock is now showing signs of weakening again. Since then, a third major pelagic stock has risen and fallen. Blue whiting, which had been fished intermittently for years, suddenly became a serious fishery in the 1990s, and just as a man- agement plan had finally been agreed, the stock went into a tailspin and fish- ing is now virtually zero. As blue whiting have been weaken- ing, mackerel, an unpredictable, migra- tory and predatory species that ranges over the North Atlantic, has seen a pop- ulation explosion, extending its migra- tion into Icelandic waters and beyond, sparking a bitter row between those na- tions whose fishermen rely heavily on the mackerel for their livelihoods. The mAckeReL cLub: No ice- LANdS ALLowed Fishermen in Britain, Ireland, Norway, the Faeroes, Denmark, Holland and elsewhere have all been through the lean years when mackerel was scarce, putting up with increasingly tight quo- tas as the mackerel club of Norwegian, Faroese and EU governments bickered and argued, but maintained a fragile truce. When massive volumes of mack- erel suddenly appeared around Iceland, things began to come unstuck. The mackerel club had consistently refused to let Iceland join on the grounds that Icelandic waters were completely mack- erel-free. That’s certainly not the case now—although history hints that the mackerel will eventually withdraw. In practical terms, the agreements over this vital fishery have been shred- ded and burned. The sight of the Ice- landic f leet shovelling up quota-free mackerel was, understandably, too much for the Faroese, not to mention that groundswell of dissatisfaction among Faroese fishermen at the low quotas while it was obvious that mack- erel were increasingly abundant on their doorstep. With Iceland enjoying a mackerel bonanza, Faroese fisheries minister Ja- cob Vestergaard stepped out of line and set autonomous quotas two years run- ning that he feels ref lect his country’s position. deTeRmiNiNG The pRobLem The reactions were predictable. EU and Norwegian fishermen who had lived with the pain of years of dwindling quotas are furious. They see newcom- ers set to cash in on the markets they have laboriously nurtured, and they see themselves being drastically under- cut by newcomers, some of whom had never even seen a mackerel as recently as five years ago. So where do the real problems lie? Fishing on the three main pelagic stocks of mackerel, Atlanto-Scandian herring and blue whiting are generally managed through brittle agreements between Norway, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands and the European Union, who hold interminable meetings and all of which are subject to intense pressure from lobby groups in their own back yards. In Norway that’s Fiskebåt; in Iceland it’s LÍÚ, the inf luential fish- ing vessel owners’ association. In the EU those lobbying are the Producers’ Organisations (POs), as well as the green groups who have been quick off the mark in condemning Iceland and the Faeroes for endangering the mack- erel stock. The media haven’t been far behind, with even the Sunday Times in London carrying a remarkably ill-in- formed article about the Icelandic and Faroese f leets being set to exterminate mackerel. Nobody wANTS To SLAuGhTeR The GoLdeN GooSe Hold on a moment… Let’s think for a moment here. There are plenty of un- complimentary things the greens can say about fishermen, but stupidity is one that simply doesn’t fit. It’s in no- body’s interest to wipe out mackerel— and this is a good place to point out that no marine species has ever been fished to extinction. The closest so far is prob- ably bluefin tuna, but even the prized bluefin are still a fair way from joining the dodo. No fishing company spends mil- lions of Euros buying and equipping a ship and then building up markets to fish for two seasons. Fishermen want to come back to that same fishery at the same time every year and sell to the same customers they’ve been deal- ing with last year and every year before that. So let’s kindly forget the whole idea of a set agenda to exterminate any- thing. Nobody wants to kill any golden geese, thanks very much. The uNhoLy TRiANGLe To begin with, the failings lie with the unholy triangle of distrust between fishing, science and politics. Science tends to dismiss information from fish- ermen as unreliable. Fishermen tend to distrust science as being inaccurate and ultimately used against them. Poli- ticians sway in the political breeze and if the wind gusts from the vote-friendly green camp, then science and fishing trail far behind. With apologies to scientists who are genuinely doing their best, fishery science is still a highly imprecise disci- pline. Imagine trying to count the trees in a forest, but with trees that you can’t see that are also constantly moving. Whatever the scientists tell us, much marine science remains informed guesswork—and any fisherman will also tell you that mackerel are notori- ously difficult to locate, plus the sheer rapidity of the mackerel’s westward ex- pansion took everyone by surprise. All of these problems are com- pounded by the failure of existing man- agement mechanisms to cope with cli- matic change and natural f luctuations in marine stocks that are due to a whole swathe of partially understood factors, of which fishing is just one. This is coupled with a short-sighted political determination to deal with each stock as a separate entity rather than as part of a complex of species within a chang- ing environment. Managing migratory stocks that ig- nore borders set by humans on the basis of national f lags leaves the whole busi- ness crippled by counter-productive baggage, virtually ensuring a tortuous process in reaching any kind of agree- ment that will always be a compromise that nobody is satisfied with. But it’s all we have—until some- one comes up with some kind of radi- cal thinking that puts the politics and national interests second to the practi- calities of management that can react to events as they happen, and not half a dozen years afterwards. I’m not holding my breath. words Quentin Bates photography Viktor Svan Forty years ago, Iceland saw its last real spell of hard times be- fore the crash of 2008. In 1968 it wasn’t the financial geniuses who failed, but the herring. A fishery that had sustained communities all around Iceland, not to men- tion coastal regions all around the north Atlantic, came to an abrupt and unexpected halt.
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