Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.07.2011, Side 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.