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The human cost of the EU's fishing failure Posted By: Bruno Waterfield in Brussels at Apr 23, 2009 at 10:51:00 [General] Posted in: Foreign Correspondents , Politics Tags: Common Fisheries Policy, EU, fishing, Irish referendum The European Commission has finally admitted that the EU's Common Fisheries Policy has failed. Cliona Conneely defends herself against the CFP (Photo: Bruno Waterfield) After over three decades of mismanagement a completely new fisheries policy is needed - but don't hold your breath. Despite, or more accurately because of, the CFP, 88 per cent of European fish stocks are over-fished, compared to 25 per cent elsewhere in the world. Almost a third - 30 per cent - of Europe's managed fisheries are "outside safe biological limits, they cannot reproduce at normal because the parenting population is too depleted", said a Brussels policy paper out on Wednesday. "Yet in many fisheries we are fishing two or three more times more than what fish stocks can sustain." There is a human cost for this policy failure for hundreds of thousands of European fishermen (280,000 of them), the British whitefish fishing fleet (for example) has been cut 60 per cent. It seems for nothing. Fishermen and women are faced with a system that treats them as hostiles and has the added downside of not working. Last July, I spoke to some of the Irish fishermen at the sharp edge of this failure. Fine people, whose tragic story is a truly European one echoed along the coastlines of Scotland, Spain, France and elsewhere. People like Cliona Conneely have been criminalised for sticking up for themselves and their interests - read more. As I argued, her expertise and commitment, like that of people in many other walks of life, was overridden by the technocrats and "experts" who impose the "we know best" rules and procedures of officialdom. But the problem with the CFP is that it is a product of a complex, hidden world of bureaucratic deal-making between EU and national officials. It is not enlightened administration. Quotas are not set around industry needs, or scientific advice on fish stock conservation, but on trade offs between officials - sometimes on utterly unrelated issues. Fishing quotas are not allocated on equitable or conservation criteria but on the grounds of contingency for the technocrats, who tell us "they know best" on such complex tans-territorial issues. Countries like Ireland and the UK, with large coastlines and a fishing industry, lost out as part of their respective late EU membership deals, when civil servants in London and Dublin decided that the industry was worth sacrificing as part of the price to join. Ireland used to point to its economic growth rates to sustain this argument - which is a brutal, but a valid one, a pity it was not had more openly and publicly at the time (in Britain too). The CFP is run for the administrative convenience of national and EU officials who use fishing industries as chips in negotiations. As the Commission has now admitted, this has been a disaster. Like so much of the EU, the CFP has been more about convenience for officials, inspectors and administrative experts (bean counters) than anything or anyone else. It is not surprising that European fishermen have become territorial about their waters and sometimes blinded to their industry's wider interest when the CFP has so often been pitted against them. I personally have no disagreement with the idea of planning across Europe's waters, seems like a rational idea to me, but such an economic policy has to be rooted in open, honest, public political debate and democratic consent. It also has to be about the industry - including, of course, the need to preserve fish stocks - not bureaucratic trade offs, often bringing entirely unrelated side deals on CAP and structural funds into the picture. I think that people and the fishing industry need to be told the truth and taken with reforms, rather than being imposed upon - this has not been the case so far and a key reason the policy has failed. A formative experience in my teenage years was the British Miners Strike 25 years ago. Like fishermen, miners, where I came from in Kent, had dirty, dangerous jobs in a declining, sometimes unproductive industry which had become a political football. One of the classic arguments deployed against the miners and for the CFP, as with so much EU policy, was the "There Is No Alternative" mantra. This is a juggernaut approach which leaves little space for people who do not fit or resist being trampled beneath a scheme imposed from above. Now the Commission has admitted that 25 years of policy has failed. Presumably, there must have been an alternative after all. Will there now be a real change, a policy based on openness, the needs of societies and industry? Let's hope so. The record is not good.