Too Valuable to be Lost: Overfishing in the North Atlantic since 1880 9783110641738, 9783110637588

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1 The Modernization of Spanish Fishing: The Case of Galicia, 1880–1936
2 The Social Dilemmas of the Portuguese Sardine: Overfishing, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Communities in the Late Nineteenth Century
3 Between Brussels and the Biologists: The Roots of the Dutch Overfishing Issue
4 Early Lessons on Overfishing from the British Isles
5 Underutilization, Undersupply, and Overfishing in the Herring Industry 1930–1980: A Case Study in the Evolution of Britain’s Productivist Fisheries Policy
6 April 18, 1989: The Acceptance of Overfishing in Norway
7 The European Common Fisheries Policy: An Economic Approach to Overfishing Solutions
8 Towards Ending Overfishing in the European Atlantic: The Role of Environmental Organizations
9 Sustainable European Fisheries: Are We There Yet?
10 A Utopia Under Construction
List of Abbreviations
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Too Valuable to be Lost

Too Valuable to be Lost Overfishing in the North Atlantic since 1880 Edited by Álvaro Garrido and David J. Starkey

Funded by Mútua dos Pescadores.

Funded with the support of Sciaena - Oceans # Conservation # Awareness

ISBN 978-3-11-063758-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064173-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063778-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943150 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover Image: © Hugo Pequeno, private collection Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Álvaro Garrido and David J. Starkey Introduction 1 Jesús Giráldez Rivero 1 The Modernization of Spanish Fishing: The Case of Galicia, 1880–1936 11 Inês Amorim 2 The Social Dilemmas of the Portuguese Sardine: Overfishing, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Communities in the Late Nineteenth Century 29 Frits Loomeijer 3 Between Brussels and the Biologists: The Roots of the Dutch Overfishing Issue 49 Robb Robinson 4 Early Lessons on Overfishing from the British Isles

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Chris Reid 5 Underutilization, Undersupply, and Overfishing in the Herring Industry 1930–1980: A Case Study in the Evolution of Britain’s Productivist Fisheries Policy 87 Petter Holm and Bjørn-Petter Finstad 6 April 18, 1989: The Acceptance of Overfishing in Norway

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Fernando González Laxe 7 The European Common Fisheries Policy: An Economic Approach to Overfishing Solutions 129 Gonçalo Carvalho 8 Towards Ending Overfishing in the European Atlantic: The Role of Environmental Organizations 147

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Contents

Rod Cappell and Fiona Nimmo 9 Sustainable European Fisheries: Are We There Yet? Álvaro Garrido and David J. Starkey 10 A Utopia Under Construction List of Abbreviations Contributors Index

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Introduction Overfishing and Sustainability: Why have our Societies Discovered Them so Late? The notions of overfishing and sustainability invoke an antinomy – a problem and its systemic solution. The problem relates to an obvious imbalance between human action and the resources available in the natural ocean; the remedy lies in institutional measures designed to rebalance this relationship, notably forms of governance that rely on scientific advice and the compliance of practitioners. Both concepts are recent scientific constructions whose meaning and ethical appeal do not yet have a social consensus that will ensure the future of the fisheries and marine ecosystems. And both have a scientific status insofar as they are amenable to normative definition and empirical modulations, but neither boasts a single definition centred on one scientific area or another. Instead, both call upon multidisciplinary knowledge, in that they each embrace a scientific dimension (bio-economic, fundamentally) and another that we may consider ethical-social. The purpose of this book is to provide a multidisciplinary appraisal of overfishing (and attempts to identify and overcome it) in the European Atlantic, and case studies of Atlantic regions that have faced overfishing problems and have partially resolved them by means of appropriate institutional devices. The discourse of this collective work is based on History and Social Sciences in general, but it also includes other scientific perspectives. Purposely, the group of researchers we have gathered includes historians, economists, biologists, and oceanographers. Some of the authors are also leaders of non-governmental organizations, which have done remarkably well to raise awareness among people and institutions of the spiral of negative effects arising from overfishing. In this volume, analytical and theoretical contributions are presented alongside essays that focus on specific regulatory experiences at the interface between non-governmental organizations and institutions of the European Union (EU) that are charged with the management of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, and bearing in mind the nonbiological ramifications of overfishing, this book discusses a global problem facing human societies from the past to the present and into the future.1 In this, as with other ecological and societal issues, we believe that historical enquiry

1 Soares, The Ocean: Our Future. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-001

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can yield vital evidence to inform debates about the socialization of institutional and human behaviour. The theoretical framework of this collective work has an institutionalist outline. This perspective is justified by the interwoven nature of the subject and by the historical focus that we want to assign to the interaction between biological phenomena, anthropogenic problems, and social impacts. Moreover, given that fisheries are a holistic social fact and a bio-socio-economic system, the issue of overfishing brings together all the dimensions of the historical process: technological development, scientific concepts and institutions, economic organization, social structures and practices, political life, and cultural representations. Understood in a broad sense as non-formal codes or “rules of the game,”2 institutions rely heavily on analyses that include the historical dynamics of marine fisheries and understand the phenomena in their temporal broadness. It should also be borne in mind that the institutions, in the strict sense, recognized by international public law and translated into a bureaucratic diplomacy where there are no lack of scientists, shape the daily lives of the Atlantic fisheries and frame fishing policies within and outside the European Union. In several oceanic regions where fishing is highly regulated and agreed – which does not mean that it is free from exploitation excesses and serious environmental imbalances – the conventional areas and the regional organizations of a multilateral nature are the main fora for mediation of the national and intergovernmental public policies that seek to address the problem of overfishing. Within the context of the European Union and of the Common Fisheries Policy, whose implications in relation to overfishing are highlighted in this book, the institutional filter weighs even more. In their various regulatory and inspection devices – all of them densely bureaucratic and sometimes contradicting each other – the CFP deploys scientific concepts to moderate the behavior of the economic and social agents. Based on essentially bio-economic scientific advice, which includes some elements of “social engineering,” the Common Policy decision-making system establishes forms of exploitation control that denote some relations of power among the member states, their lobbies, and the European institutions themselves. Considering that the design of management models influence the way scientists produce knowledge about fisheries activity, a central issue in the study of overfishing is knowing how to define and how to measure institutional success in a particular fisheries management system. Is it through technical and strictly biological factors, or should social, economic, and even political processes and power relations also be included in the assessment? As underscored by Vera Schwach et al.:

2 North, Structure and Change.

Introduction

3

Fisheries management is a political system with technical components operating within political constraints. Technical success is not the main criterion for institutional success, at least not before strong political pressures are generated by technical failures.3

The theoretical base of this book, and the scientific argument that gave rise to it, accords with the trends of international maritime historiography. Since the issue of overfishing is an injunctive phenomenon that combines a myriad of issues, we adopt an approach that straddles marine environmental history and historical ecology.4 The history of the Atlantic Ocean and the maritime activities undertaken in the coastal states and numerous local communities in Europe and North America has a strong scientific tradition, especially in France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Denmark. However, until the late twentieth century the majority of publications were based on a functional and fragmentary view of maritime industries. As a rule, ocean fisheries were studied in a watertight manner within the scope of national sovereign powers, and focused on the history of voyages, boats, and catch techniques.5 Since the 1990s, however, the history of the fisheries has extended beyond the confines of economic history to embrace interdisciplinary perspectives and methods, which include a fresh approach to issues of governance and sustainability. This entails interaction with the sciences of the sea: oceanography, biology, and ecology. Historical analysis of the overfishing problem must take these methodological requirements into account and establish dialogue with the new wave of the Ocean History.6 Since it is a matter of a scientific concept that has its own history, whose perceptions are dynamic, the history of overfishing requires a transdisciplinary effort and should combine biophysical aspects with socioeconomic factors. The spatial boundaries of this book are not rigid, but are based on a geographic framework that has a certain unity. The European Atlantic, understood in a biophysical and historical-cultural perspective, is a geographical space that frames oceanic regions with common and specific features, a geography of physical, biological, and cultural diversity. It is an immense and varied space that, historically, has been shaped by the interaction of topographical, oceanographic, and some common ecological characteristics. The way in which the biophysical factors combined with the anthropogenic factors allows an understanding of the economic and social structure of communities that are dependent on the exploitation

3 4 5 6

Schwach, “Policy and Knowledge,” 802. Bolster, “Putting the Ocean into Atlantic History.” Starkey, “North Atlantic Fisheries,” 16–17; Broeze, Maritime History at the Crossroads, 9–17. Bolster, “Putting the Ocean into Atlantic History.”

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of the living resources of the sea, and of fishing in particular. This variable combination of natural and socio-cultural factors, and the interaction between coastal communities and the sea, conditions the fishing systems and the organization of the factors of production upstream and downstream of the capture. This book therefore includes chapters devoted to several Atlantic regions where the land interfaces with the ocean and sea. The spatial span extends from Scandinavia to Portugal, from the coastal waters and communities of the Norwegian Arctic to the Iberian Atlantic, and from the Bay of Biscay to the Algarve and the Strait of Gibraltar. The case studies of regional and national scope that are included in this book cover a geographic area that coincides with the North Atlantic, stretching from the Arctic line, at about 80º north to the south of the Iberian Peninsula, touching the African northwest at about 37º. The studies presented here show the ways in which the problem of overfishing was felt and confronted in areas of Portugal, Galicia, The Netherlands, Norway, and the British Isles. The scientific diagnosis of problems associated with overfishing, and the institutional solutions implemented in each spatio-temporal setting, are the common themes addressed in the nine chapters that follow. The chronological horizon of this book goes back to the nineteenth century to place the phenomenon of overfishing in a long-term context. It was then, especially on the edges of the North Sea, that the problem of overfishing became clearly apparent due to the industrialization of the fisheries, a process that entailed the introduction, at different rates in different fisheries, of steam propulsion, trawls, and, later, refrigerated holds. When these innovations arrived on board, the pressure to produce more, and distribute better, intensified.7 This pattern has persisted, which is reflected in the inclusion in this volume of chapters that consider the present situation and project future scenarios. According to global data published by FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), world catches of fish in marine waters in 2016 amounted to 91 million tonnes, slightly less than in previous years. More than a third of the global production of fish and shellfish involved the movement of labour and capital, and fuelled international business. FAO estimated that in 2016 the value of world imports of fishery products amounted to US$ 40 billion.8 In the hierarchy of production, China stood at the apex, with 15 million tonnes of fish and shellfish landed, followed by Indonesia with 6 million. More than 2 million tonnes of China’s output derived from fishing in inland waters. Norway

7 Robinson, Trawling, 37–63. 8 FAO 2016.

Introduction

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was the leading European producer, landing 2 million tonnes, while Morocco and Iceland followed with just over 1 million tonnes each. Altogether, the fleets and fishermen of the European Union captured 6.5 million tonnes of fish and seafood, an amount very close to that indicated by FAO for the USA. As the fifth largest producer of fish and seafood in the world, the European Union includes major fish and aquaculture producing countries. Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark are currently the largest EU producers, although much of the Danish catch is intended for fishmeal to supply aquaculture stations, while in 2016 the British voted to leave the EU. At the global level, tuna continues to be the species most caught in marine waters, followed by coalfish or saithe (pollachius virens), a low-price gadoid of high consumption, which is very common in the northeast and northwest Atlantic. These and other performance measures commonly cited by international organizations, and by governments of the countries where fishing has a more prominent economic and social weight, rarely reflect the environmental problems caused by intensive fishing and aquaculture. Besides the problem of overfishing, which continues to threaten various living ocean species and human communities, international organizations and scientists increasingly draw attention to the problem of discards, of unintentional waste and of “illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing” (IUU), a priority issue in the current EU’s CFP. FAO estimated that in 2016 over 15 million tonnes of the fish caught in the world – 16 percent of the registered global catch – were rejected or thrown overboard for commercial or other reasons. Additionally, due to the lack of industrial refrigeration structures, and because of other problems in the marketing chain of seafood products, at least 10 percent of the world production of fish and shellfish was lost involuntarily, either on board or at the moment of landing.9 Unpredictable and global in nature, climate change is impacting significantly on oceanic ecosystems and on the habitats of several species of fish in high demand and of high commercial value. Hydrographic conditions have altered, which has affected the bio-oceanographic characteristics of a number of marine regions, the migratory patterns of species, and the distribution of the biomass. The increase in the cost of fisheries production factors, and the evidence of diminishing returns, trigger the vicious circle of over-investment, subsidies, and over-exploitation, which, as a rule, are cause and effect of overfishing. While this chain of phenomena is not new, the fact is that the global climate crisis and its impacts on the ecosystems instil an additional factor into overfishing that is complex and difficult to regulate.

9 FAO 2016.

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The regulatory instruments of the CFP, regardless of the changes introduced in each review, are designed, in part, to solve the problem of overfishing in European waters. Nevertheless, the sustainable exploitation of fishery resources (fish and seafood) is far from a safe reality, although in recent years there has been great progress. In 2003, about 22 percent of fish stocks managed by the CFP were outside the biological safety limits. At present, the picture is less bleak and objectives laid down in official documents of the CFP are more ambitious than ever: by 2020, there should be no resource at risk of overfishing in European waters. The key concept of the EU fisheries governance system is the MSY (maximum sustainable yield), a theoretical and empirical tool whose main purpose is to prevent over-exploitation of resources and its economic and social effects. According to the European Environment Agency: The MSY is the maximum catch (in numbers or mass) that can be removed from a population (or stock) over an indefinite period. Exploiting fish stocks at or below the MSY allows them to be maintained or allows them to recover to healthy levels, providing food for consumers while contributing to important ecosystem and marine food web functions.10

Reflecting its neoclassical roots, MSY implies fixing the maximum amount that can be fished for a particular stock, so that in future years it is highly likely that the same amount will continue to be caught without running the risk of diminishing returns. The catch level compatible with sustainability of the stock of a given species implies, in turn, setting an appropriate rate of fishing mortality. According to the reasoning of the MSY and of the system scientific advice embodying the CFP, compliance with the “biosecurity” levels of the species requires definition of the exploitation limits in order to prevent overfishing and its impacts. The exploitation of each species must be maintained at a “safe” or “optimal” level without calling into question the return on capital and other production factors. In turn, the main instruments of implementation of the MSY are the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) and the corresponding national quotas by species. Lastly, the TACs and the quotas consist of maximum catch limits resulting from the allocation of the biomass estimates arising from the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). The generation of scientific advice intended for a fisheries management system is not a neutral process, nor is it free of controversy about its effectiveness in preventing overfishing. The production of science applied to institutional fisheries regulation systems establishes interactions between knowledge and policy-making and this dialectic involves the various players involved in

10 European Environment Agency, Status of Marine Fish and Shellfish Stocks.

Introduction

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fisheries.11 Some scientists and policymakers, for example, question the centralist and reducing role that the TACs – “the TACs machine” as some authors call this device12– play in the management and advisory system of fishing policies within the scope of the EU and ICES. At present, although estimates of stocks are more reliable and sophisticated than ever, scientific opinions are almost limited to studies of the dynamics of the populations made by biologists within the framework of the old single-species TAC system. Experienced scientists, such as Daniel Pauly and Sidney Holt,13 warn that the population dynamics models used by biologists end up by inducing overfishing rather than eliminating it.14 In the stock management system inherent in the EU’s CFP, and ICES itself, almost everything comes down to setting resource-allocation rules to prevent overfishing. The forms of achieving the MSY and ensuring its institutional compliance, for example, are questioned by some scientists and do not have the consensus of economists, particularly those who question the principles of “balance” and “maximum efficiency” in the neoclassical synthesis. Taking into account these and other weaknesses of the fisheries governance system in the EU and elsewhere, an appeal is made to scientists to open their stock-estimation models to the problems and concepts of the social sciences, including Sociology and Anthropology. It is precisely here that the gradual replacement of stock-based scientific opinions by fisheries-based models can be altered to include historical knowledge itself in the management of the fisheries.15 We hope that this book demonstrates how an understanding of the past can contribute to the resolution of contemporary and future overfishing problems.

Bibliography Bolster, W. Jeffrey. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Bolster, W. Jeffrey. “Putting the Ocean into Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800.” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 19–47. Broeze, Frank, ed. Maritime History at the Crossroads: A Critical Review of Recent Historiography. St. John’s Newfoundland: IMEHA, 1995.

11 12 13 14 15

Schwach, “Policy and Knowledge,” 798. Holm and Nielsen, “The TAC Machine.” Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” Clover, End of the Line, 92. Schwach, “Policy and Knowledge,” 800.

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CEC. Green Paper on the Future of the Common Fisheries Policy. Commission of the European Community, 2001. Degnbol, Paul, and B. J. McCay. “Unintended and Perverse Consequences of Ignoring Linkages in Fisheries Systems.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 64 (2007): 793–797. European Environment Agency (2019). Status of Marine Fish and Shellfish Stocks in European Seas, 2019. https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/status-of-marine-fish -stocks-3/assessment-1. FAO 2016. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2016: Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. Rome, 2016. FAO 2018. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018: Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. Rome, 2018. Finley, Carmel. All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Finley, Carmel, and Naomi Oreskes. “Maximum Sustained Yield: A Policy Disguised as Science.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 70 (2013): 245–250. Garrido, Álvaro. “Science, Law and Diplomacy in the Portuguese Fisheries Management, 1948–1977.” E-Journal of Portuguese History. Brown University, III, 2 (2005): 1–28. Gordon, H. Scott. “The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery.” Journal of Political Economy III (1954): 124–142. Holden, M. J. The Common Fisheries Policy. Oxford: Fishing News Books, 1994. Holm, Poul, and K. N. Nielsen. “The TAC Machine.” WGFS Annual Report, 40–51. Copenhagen: ICES, 2004. Holm, Poul, and David J. Starkey, eds. Technological Change in the North Atlantic Fisheries. Esbjerg: Fisheries and Shipping Musuem, 1999. Una revision por países. Corunha: Netbiblo/Institituto Universitario de Estudios Marítimos, 2008. Myers, R. A., and Boris Worm. “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities.” Nature III, 423 (2003): 280–283. Nimmo, Fiona, and Rod Cappell. Taking Stock: Progress towards Ending Overfishing in the EU. Report Produced by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management Ltd for The Pew Charitable Trusts. 2017. North, Douglass. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton, 1981. OECD. The Ocean Economy in 2030. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264251724-en OECD. Towards Sustainable Fisheries. Paris: OECD Publishing, 1997. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pauly, Daniel. “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10 (1995): 430. Robinson, Robb. Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996. Ruivo, Mário, and Adam Ben-Tuvia. Trends in World High Seas Fisheries and Potential Exploitation of Living Resources of the Sea. Miami: University of Miami, Institute of Marine Science, 1967. Schwach, Vera et al. “Policy and Knowledge in Fisheries Management: A Policy Brief.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 64 (2007): 798–803.

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Schaefer, Milner B. “Some Aspects of the Dynamics of Populations Important to the Management of Commercial Marine Fisheries.” Bulletin of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission I (1954): 27–56. Smith, Tim D. Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855–1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Soares, Mário, ed. The Ocean Our Future. Cambridge: Independent World Commission on the Oceans, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Starkey, David J. “The North Atlantic Fisheries: Bearings, Currents and Grounds.” In A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twenty-First Century, edited by David J. Starkey and Ingo Heidbrink, 13–26. Bremen: Hauschild, 2012. Starkey, David J., and Ingo Heidbrink, eds. A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twenty-First Century. Bremen: Hauschild, 2012. Symes, David, ed. Fisheries Dependent Regions. Oxford: Fishing News Books, 2000.

Jesús Giráldez Rivero

1 The Modernization of Spanish Fishing: The Case of Galicia, 1880–1936 Galicia, located in the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, facing the North Atlantic Ocean, has 1,195 kilometers of coastline. One of its most singular features is the number of estuary entries called “Rías.” The continental shelf, defined as the area from the tide line to a depth of around 200 meters, is relatively small. Its width oscillates between 11 and 20 nautical miles, with an estimated area of between 4,000 and 5,000 square miles. The fertility that characterizes the Galician coast derives from its location in an area with an upwelling of nutrients, giving rise to high biological productivity, both on the platform and, especially, inside the estuaries. Although the fishing wealth of Galicia had been exploited for centuries, its use was limited to those species that could be preserved using traditional methods. Under the stimulus of increasing demand, the industrialization of the fishing sector began in the final decades of the nineteenth century; it was referred to as the “process of modernization of catches and aquaculture productions destined exclusively for the consumer market.”1 Change intensified during the 1880s. The growth in demand for fish due to the development of the hermetically preserved sardine industry (Sardina pilchardus) and the opening of the railway lines, which connected Galician ports with the interior of the peninsula, stimulated the general transformation of the sector. Techniques changed; new gear was distributed, from purse seines in surface fishing and trawling in bottom fishing to new vessels, with mechanical traction procedures and the use of steam engines. The activity became more intensive. The rise in the capital/labor ratio, the spread of wage labor, and the greater efficiency in fishing techniques led to an increase in production and a regular supply for market. At the same time, it also stimulated a concentration of the means of production and a growing separation of industrial and artisan fishing, dominated by family labor or small groups of co-owners, less intensive techniques, traditional means of production, and traditional knowledge. The mobilization of productive factors not only caused an increase in working capital, but also in the resources themselves, after gaining access to fishing grounds and populations of previously unexploited fish. The institutional framework adapted to the new situation. The legal and economic obstacles that limited access to fishing were gradually 1 Athayde Couto, “Algunas cuestiones,” 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-002

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eliminated. Promulgated in 1886, El Reglamento de la libertad de la pesca reglamentada, (The rules for rights to regulated fishing), which established that fishing outside the defined three-mile Spanish territorial waters was completely unregulated, constituted a clear example of the lack of interest on the part of the state in effectively regulating fishing activity. In fact, marine fishing policy moved back and forth from absence to the inability of the state to bring into effect regulated access to resources. As such, the industry was abandoned to a laissez-faire legal environment, although some have pointed to the common property system as the cause of the so-called “tragedy of the commons.”2 The consolidation of the free market consecrated the extension of free access.3

The Canning Industry and the Transformation of Surface Fishing The take-off of the hermetic canning industry was key to the development of Galician fishing activity, with the influence of sardine fishing overwhelmingly dominating the whole of the sector. Being strongly seasonal, sardine fishing was concentrated from June to January when work and capital were mobilized, and it acted as a regulator on the rest of the fisheries: hake (Merluccius merluccius), sea bream (Pagellus bogavareo), conger (Conger conger) or octopus (Octopus vulgaris). It was also the base of the salting industry, being practically the only “customer.” There was no open market for sardines; the fishermen were subjected to a monopoly exercised by the fish-salting plant owners, who regulated transactions by means of contracts established at the beginning of the season. However, between 1880 and 1887, the unexpected disappearance of sardines off the coasts of Brittany and La Vendée caused a crisis in the French fish preserving industry, the world’s leading producer. Some entrepreneurs established factories, or associated with Galician salting plants, to produce and export their preserves with French labelling: Galicia’s six existing plants in 1880 had doubled to 12 within five years, and would reach 50 by the turn of the century. The production of preserves was aimed at exports: 206 tons in 1876–1880, 1,247 in 1886–1890, and 2,281 in 1891–1895. French businessmen played a key role in the development of Galician canneries; on the one hand, by providing

2 Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1245–1248; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 212. 3 Byskov, “Socio-cultural Characteristics,” 99–128; Carmona, “La formaciòn de la industria conservera,” 177–195.

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techniques for factory construction, production processes, and also specialized workers, and, on the other hand, by ensuring indispensable markets, something which the Galician salting industry had lacked.4 The growth in the number of canneries played a direct part in the increased effort directed towards encouraging changes in the legal framework; access to resources was facilitated and the sardine seasonality ban was abolished. In all, the growth in demand for sardines caused prices to increase, threatening to strangle the growth of the canning industry that drove it. The solution found by the sector was the diffusion, starting in 1896, of new fishing units called traíñas. This was a combination of a new gear called fencing, flake, or American fence (purse seine), and a new boat, called a trainera or traíña, which was very light, worked by a skipper, coxswain and 12 oarsmen that gave it the required maneuverability and speed. With greater capture capacity than traditional gear and methods, they were able to solve supply problems by increasing and stabilizing landings. The drastic technical change brought about by their diffusion radically transformed the sardine industry. However, the traíñas also radically altered the social relations of production existing on the Galician coast, directly affecting the traditional drift net fishermen. Hence, its propagation would be interpreted as an expropriation of the means of production from traditional fishermen and would lead to a generalized, prolonged, and virulent conflict. Only at the end of 1901 did a solution begin to appear when the canneries began to finance the purchase of the units from the fishermen. This access to property was decisive in cushioning the social conflict and contributed to the rapid diffusion of new units; in 1906, 711 seines were already registered in Galicia. Undoubtedly, the end result of the traíñas conflict facilitated the creation of an economic, social, and cultural environment conducive to the renovation of techniques in the direction of higher intensity fishing. Although the capture of the sardine was the most directly involved, the positive environment for the introduction of new techniques also influenced the rest of the fisheries.5 But there was also the government’s apathy, which opened the way for the indiscriminate use of explosives in fishing, a procedure that would be used throughout the twentieth century to increase catches cheaply.6

4 Carmona, “La formación de la industria conservera,” 177–195. 5 Giráldez, “El conflicto,” 233–251; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 221–236. 6 The use and abuse of this method became such that it could be stated: “in some maritime regions they are used so much that there is almost no fishing that is not done by this procedure.” Rodríguez, “Pesca de altura,” 50–112.

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50000 45000 40000 35000 30000 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 1906

1910

1915

1920 Pilchard

1925

1930

1935

Total

Figure 1.1: Landings of pelagic species in Vigo, 1906–1935 (tons). Source: Jesús Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación del sector pesquero gallego, 1880–1936 (Madrid: MAPA, 1996), 114.

With the cost of the sardine being one of the main factors in the competitiveness of the Galician preserves, the resolution of the conflict of the traíñas stimulated growth in its production. In fact, by the early twentieth century the Galician canning industry was competing effectively with the French and was freeing itself from their technical mentorship, with its exports growing year by year. However, the sharp decline in sardine abundance between 1909 and 1912 slowed this development; production and exports fell, and the number of companies contracted as well.7 Resolving this first major crisis in the sector required lowering the price of sardines, which meant increasing the capture capacity of the fishing units, something difficult given the technical specifications for the traíñas. The answer was found in the diffusion of steam-powered vessels, which shortened the voyage to the fishing grounds and enabled the use of larger seines and faster maneuvering. In addition, they facilitated the extension of the operational range of ships, which could now access Portuguese waters in search of sardines; that is, they rendered the whole stock of the Atlantic sector of the Iberian shelf a

7 Carmona and Nadal, El empeño Industrial de Galicia, 131–140.

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Galician fishing industry. With the propagation of these vessels, the transformation of fisheries that had been the main nucleus of fishing activity in Galicia for centuries was complete.8

The Railway and the Development of the Table Fish Industry One of the elements that had conditioned fishing activity for centuries was the highly perishable nature of fish, which limited its consumption to a coastal strip or to immediate preservation. The fishing techniques used were mainly longline, used with sailing boats, which concerted their activity when the sardine capture was suspended. In Galicia, during the late nineteenth century, the capture of table species, mainly hake and sea bream, was concentrated principally in ports such as A Coruña and Vigo, where there were local markets that had the processing capacity to pickle sea bream or horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus) for the commercial market.9 However, everything changed with the opening of the railway lines that connected the ports of A Coruña and Vigo with the interior of the peninsula in 1883 and 1885, respectively. The consequences for the sector were far-reaching, especially for the sub-sector oriented towards the capture of table fish, similar to that experienced by other countries.10 Of all the advantages that the railroad offered, low price, capacity of load, and speed, the main one for fish was the latter, eliminating the restrictions imposed on fresh fish consumption by its fast deterioration. By connecting the ports with the main urban centers of the interior, the railway made it possible for fish to arrive fresh to those consumer markets. This prompted the creation of a supply chain that permitted fresh-fish merchandise to be sold as such in the place where it would indeed be used or consumed.11 Under demand pressure, a process of technical change marked by the passage from sail to steam began. The first steam-powered fishing boats that appeared in Galicia were wooden hulled, with limited dimensions, 20 Trb, compound steam engines, and a crew of seven men using traditional longlines. With these new boats, fishing conditions were significantly modified. By making

8 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 248–251. 9 Carmona, “La formaciòn de la industria conservera,” 177–195. 10 Coull, Fisheries of Europe, 59–83; Sahrhage and Lundbeck, History of Fishing, 103–109, 224; Robinson, “Evolution of Railway Fish Traffic Policies,” 32–43; Martin Wilcox, “Railways, Roads,” 741–764; Moulinier, La Pêche industrielle de La Rochelle, 33–40. 11 Varela, Procesos de producción, 103.

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the vessels independent of winds, tides, and currents, steam lengthened the capture period and fishing days per year, widened the working radius to new catch areas, and freed fishermen from the labors of sailing. They also made it possible to take better advantage of the new means of rail transport, by being able to more easily adapt to the strict schedule of the railway, which was fundamental for the commercialization of fish since unloaded catches depreciated immediately after the departure of trains. Their numbers grew rapidly because market expansion ensured elevated profits: from the eight steam-powered vessels belonging to Vigo in 1888, the fleet grew to 34 in 1894, and ten years later there were 138 operating in Galicia, representing 40 percent of those registered in Spain.12 Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twentieth century, these longline steam-powered vessels were facing competition from the “door” trawlers, carrying this name because the funnel-shaped opening of the net was achieved by its release through wooden doors located in its mouth (known as the otter trawl in the British Isles). Their proliferation would not have occurred without the favorable environment for technical changes created by the diffusion of the traíñas at the beginning of the century, the high prices reached for fine species in final destination markets, and the continual presence of foreign steamers fishing off the Galician coasts. The first appearance of the door trawlers in Galicia took place in the port of A Coruña in 1904, and two years later there were 20 units of this type registered. Imported mostly from England, they were steel-hulled, had a tonnage that ranged from 150 to 300 Trb, a mounted triple expansion steam engine with between 200 and 450 Cvi, and were equipped with refrigerators with ice so that they could be away from port for several days. With these vessels, deep-sea fishing (defined as that which spends several days outside the six-mile jurisdictional waters) burst forth in Galicia. Faced with the competition from the trawlers in A Coruña, Vigo’s boat owners adapted their longline steamers for trawling: two boats towing a net similar to that of the door trawlers could open a net while navigating in parallel. These new fishing units, called pairs, ended up becoming the most particular form of Galician and Spanish fishing in the twentieth century.13 Steam power was fully incorporated into door and pair trawler fishing, and from that point on it would not only act on the speed of displacement of the ship, or its radius of action, but also on the fishing itself. Having its effect on, to a large extent, its efficiency over the capacity of traction of the machine,

12 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 255–261. 13 Sinde, “Estrategia de crecimiento”, ftp://ftp.fundacionsepi.es/phe/hdt2002.pdf, accessed May 4, 2019; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 261–268.

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mechanical force was definitively integrated into the fishing function itself. The capture capacity of these units was 15 times that of the longline steam fishing boats, allowing for their amortization in five or six years, key factors that explained their rapid expansion.14 In 1907, trawling had already become widespread, and with a fleet of 24 door trawlers and 42 pairs the bulk of trawling activity in Spain was concentrated in Galicia, displacing the Basque Country, which had been a pioneer in the adoption of this type of fishing.15 With the spread of the trawlers, the first stage of technical transformations in the subsector dedicated to the capture of white fish was closed. Their proliferation had a direct impact on supply; the increased production, especially that of hake and sea bream, led to a decline in prices in final markets, stimulating its consumption, but also helping to broaden the composition of the supply, by bringing previously unknown, or little consumed, species to market.

2.5

2

1.5

1

0.5

0 1897

1900

1905 Hake

Red Sea Bream

1910 Pilchard

Figure 1.2: Retail prices in Madrid, 1897–1913 (pesetas/kilo). Source: compiled from data taken from the Boletín del Ayuntamiento de Madrid.

14 Rodríguez, “Pesca de altura,” 50–112. 15 López, “Recursos naturales,” 157–209.

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Nonetheless, fishing companies’ profits began to fall as the size of the fleet increased and the sector started to experience diminishing returns, which caused costs to increase. In Vigo, the trawling fleet was reduced from 33 pairs in 1908 to 15 in 1912, and 7 in 1914. Without a doubt, the drop in yields in usual fishing grounds encouraged displacement to the port of A Coruña.16 The trawler fleet from A Coruña also experienced similar difficulties; the number of trawlers fell from 20 in 1907 to 10 in 1913, although in that year pairs increased to 38. However, among the difficulties experienced by the trawling fleet, factors relating to commercial structures also intervened. The increase in competition, due to the accumulation of landings in the ports of A Coruña and Vigo, as well as the concentration of remittances in the main consumption centers like Madrid and Barcelona, caused a sharp decline in the price of whitefish.17 From 1907 onwards, the heavy losses had forced shipowners to take different exit strategies. The drop in yields and profits caused some shipowners to sell their boats and abandon the activity, others to move them to different points along the Cantabrian Coast, the South Atlantic, or the Mediterranean Sea, in order to supply and exercise a high degree of control over markets that were difficult to access from Galicia. Still more decided to integrate vertically their activities. The most significant example of the latter was that of Luis Lamigueiro, creator of Pescaderías Coruñesas, a company that combined production, transportation, and marketing.18 It had its own fleet of trawlers, operated its own factory of nets, cables, ice, and refrigerated wagons, as well as managing a network of retail stores in Madrid, which allowed it to set prices in the capital. Its clearly capitalist structure allowed it to dominate the capital’s market, being one of the pioneering companies in the transformation of the artisan character of Madrid’s commercial sector.19 Playing against Pescaderías Coruñesas’s strategy of vertical integration was the small amount of capital required to enter the fishing business, and the existence of traditional fish merchant networks established in Madrid, very well connected with the main fishing ports in Galicia. In its favor was its important fleet and high production volume, which made the reduction of transaction costs possible by eliminating intermediaries, regularizing supplies, and guaranteeing their quality. In fact, it did not take long to incorporate rail transport into the company’s value chain, first using conventional wagons and, later,

16 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 272–273. 17 Sinde, “Estrategia de crecimiento”; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 272–278. 18 The early initiation of vertical integration in Spain is remarkable; similar projects did not develop in France until the 1920s and in Britain until the 1930s. Mahe, Petite Histoire, 83; Moulinier, La Pêche industrielle, 122–128; Wilcox, “Railways, Roads,” 741–764. 19 Sinde, “El abastecimiento”; Nielfa, Los sectores mercantiles, 73.

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refrigerated wagons, which helped to reduce costs and avoid the problems of shipments in times of heat. This is how the company sought to expand its competitive advantages.20 In this regard, certain authors stress that in the face of the unpredictable nature of the supply of fish, subject to frequent fluctuations, vertical integration through the management and coordination of the different means of production, distribution, and marketing practices was advantageous for its stabilization. However, it also required similar minimum efficient scales in the different phases in order to take advantage of economies of scale.21

From the First World War to the Civil War On the eve of the First World War, the Galician fishing sector had already established itself as a fully modern sector. Its carry-over effects extended to numerous activities: shipbuilding, various mechanical and metal fabrications, nets and cordage, packaging manufacturing, metallography, ice production, lighting, gas, marine insurance, commercial services, transport etc. Although many points along the Galician coast were involved, the activity tended to be concentrated in A Coruña and Vigo; in 1910–1914 both ports represented more than 50 percent of offloading and 64 percent of the value of fish landed in Galicia. Being the main Spanish fishing region, it accounted for more than 40 percent of the number of Spanish fishing boats, gear, and fishermen, as well as 35 percent of the quantity, and 31 percent of the value, of fish landed. The outbreak of the First World War had a direct impact on the fishing sector and related activities. Difficulties with maritime transport and various supply problems restricted the import of products. The rapid rise in the price of coal and tin as well as difficulties with the importation of machinery, accoutrements, nets etc. all caused a general increase in production costs for the fishing, canning, and shipbuilding industries. At the same time, the rise in maritime freights encouraged the sale of numerous fishing boats for merchant traffic, while the shortage of railroad materials limited the export of fresh fish to the interior and made it more expensive. All fishing activity suffered, the fleet decreased, and production with it.22

20 Sinde, “Estrategia de crecimiento”; Sinde, “El abastecimiento.” 21 Wilcox, “Railways, Roads,” 741–764; Isaksen, Dreyer and Grønhaug, “Vertical Integration and Performance,” 41–59. 22 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 283–295; Carmona, “Recursos, organización,” 127–162.

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After 1917, import substitution softened the problems that affected fishing. Sector capitalization allowed favorable market conditions to be translated into investment, fleet, and production. The growth of the fleet accelerated due to the incorporation of a large number of trawlers acquired in England after the First World War, and the construction of larger wooden hulled vessels with triple expansion steam engines, of greater power and with lower consumption. In Vigo, between 1917 and 1920, the number of vessels doubled, their tonnage tripled, and average horsepower increased by 50 percent.23 The fishing effort deployed by this fleet in recovered fishing grounds – neglected because of the fall in activity during the war – experienced exceptional results. The maximum number of discharges for the first third of the twentieth century was reached in 1921, tripling the tonnage offloaded in 1917 (see Figure 1.3). The strong growth in supply set the foundation for very favorable price movements for fresh fish relative to those of other foods, such as meat or cod. During these years the apparent consumption of fresh fish took off in the Spanish market, doubling the quantities consumed in the first decade of the century.24

160000 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000

1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1932 1933 1934

1883 1889 1892

0

Tons

Thousand of Pesetas

Figure 1.3: Galician fish production, 1883–1934. Source: Jesús Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación del sector pesquero gallego, 1880–1936 (Madrid: MAPA, 1996), 95–96.

23 Andrade, Producción y fluctuación, 61–63; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 296–302. 24 Piquero and López, “El consumo de pescado.”

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The expansive stage reached its peak at the beginning of the new decade. In 1920, the Federación Nacional de Industrias Pesqueras y Derivadas warned that “there was an excess of production that has not found its proper placement in the markets.”25 The significant accumulation of capital made by shipowners since the final years of the war, encouraged by favorable prices, was invested in fishing equipment that soon encountered the rigidity of demand. Seeking market control, some companies intensified their vertical integration, internalizing transport and retailing, while, in order to reduce costs and ensure the provisioning of basic inputs (coal, ice, repairs or naval effects), they engaged in quasi integration processes. This did not prevent the limits from being clearly expressed from 1923 onwards, when the market’s positive trend inverted, the growth of fishing effort was halted, and catches fell.26 In combination with this difficult situation came a serious shortage of sardines. In 1923, the number of catches contracted sharply, and in the following two years there were hardly any landings at all. In addition, the closure, in 1917, of Portuguese waters to the Spanish fleet excluded that possibility of compensating for the lack of sardines at home, in Galician waters. Although the factors that caused this crisis were independent of the fishing activity itself, perhaps the continuous and widespread use of explosives aggravated the situation. But its use was only the tip of the iceberg; the abandonment of the sector by the State left a truly devastating panorama, where the looting of fishery resources reached its peak.27 The reaction of the sector to the crisis was to devise a catch diversification strategy, which had already been rehearsed during the crisis of 1909. The fleet was reoriented towards other pelagic species, such as the sprat (Sprattus sprattus), the horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus), and the anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) (see Figure 1.1) in order to alleviate the shortage of sardine, making for a considerable reduction in the cost of the raw materials destined for the canning industry. Pushed by the lack of sardine, some operations moved to Huelva, on the South Atlantic coast, to search in Moroccan waters, others set up factories in Setúbal, Portugal, and others settled in the north of Galicia, reorienting towards the anchovy, tuna, or albacore. A productive diversification undertaken by Galician canneries allowed them to compete advantageously in international markets and, even though the profits for some companies were affected by the effects of this crisis, the sector, as a whole, was able to maintain

25 Boletín de Pescas, 48–52. 26 Sinde, “Estrategia de crecimiento”; Sinde, “El abastecimiento de pescado fresco”; Giráldez, “As orixes dunha gran liñaxe pesqueira,” 162–182. 27 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 305–306.

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similar levels of production and exports. Another strategy deployed by the sector was to increase tonnage and the power of the boats, and the diffusion of combustion engines in the fleet of smaller vessels also began. Of Swedish or British origin, their propagation was propelled by their low cost, fuel economy, ease of use, and the elimination of specialized personnel. Their proliferation in Galicia was very rapid; by 1930 their number had ascended to 900.28 The 1920s were also bad years for trawling. From the beginning of the decade, the decline in yields slowed the growth of production; hake catches fell sharply, while whiting of the smallest sizes increased. In the same way, the fall in the catches of sea bream affected the longline fleet, being offset by an increase in the fishing of the Atlantic pomfret (Brama brama) and albacore (Thunnus alalunga), destined for the canning industry. The revenues from the fleet reflected the lower valuation of these species and the increase in operating costs caused by the need to increase the radius of action, search time, and work time of the vessels. As with the coastal fisheries, the average tonnage of the steam-powered boats, as well as their horsepower, experienced continuous growth. This overexploitation of the most frequented fishing areas stimulated Galician trawlers to march towards South Atlantic ports, mainly Cádiz, the base for working the North African and Portuguese fisheries. The cause of the dispersal, which began in 1924, was made explicit: “the waters of the north have been depleted, run into ruin, and the ship owners, before reaching definitive bankruptcy . . . have sought refuge in Cádiz.”29 This migration to the south made it possible to alleviate the serious decline in catches on the northern littoral, stimulating the rise of Andalusian fisheries.30 Shortly after, part of the Galician fleet moved to the port of Pasajes, in the Basque Country, to work in the grounds of the Bay of Biscay, and, from 1928 onwards, in the fisheries of the Grande Sole. Thus, starting in the late 1920s, fishing banks located on the European continental shelf, the Celtic Sea, and the southwest of Ireland (La Chapelle, Petite Sole, Grande Sole, Labadie, Jones, Melville etc.) began to be frequented by Galician trawlers. What Paz Andrade called the first expansion of Spanish fishing was taking place.31 From now on, the trawling fleet would initiate a swallow type of migration, working on the banks of the European platform from spring to summer and marching south with the first storms of autumn to its bases in southern Spain, to the fishing grounds of Portugal, Morocco, and the Sahara.

28 Carmona and Nadal, El empeño Industrial de Galicia, 145–147; Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 305–310. 29 Asociación General, Memoria . . . 1924. 30 Giráldez, “Armadores de Cádiz,” 91–112; Sinde, “Estrategia de crecimiento.” 31 Paz Andrade, “El proceso,” 83–94.

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The reorientation of fishing activity towards these new fishing grounds was accompanied by the adoption of certain transcendental technological innovations. In the early 1920s, it was the Vigneron-Dahl system, a device consisting of a steel cable that separated the wooden doors from the mouth of the trawl, permitting a larger opening, greater nimbleness in operation, and savings in coal consumption. Although Russell estimated that the effects on catches resulted in an increase of between 30 and 50 percent, the effects on Galician fishing are difficult to quantify as there is a lack of knowledge regarding the speed of its expansion. The Vigneron-Dahl mechanism was easy to install and unnecessary to acquire, but was only fitted into door trawlers, not the pairs, which were the most numerous in terms of units.32 Not long after, circa 1926, radiotelegraphy multiplied, allowing for remote communication between ships, or with ports, which assisted in the orientation of work effort, the coordination of landings according to the situation of the markets, and the communication of navigation incidents.33 The Galician fishing sector began to grow again in 1927, with increasing catches, production, and fleet. The coastal sardine, the best during the period prior to the Spanish Civil War, coincided with an increase of the landings of table fish, especially hake, from operations in the Celtic Sea fisheries. The average landings between the three-year periods 1925–1927 and 1931–1933 grew by more than 50 percent in Galicia, especially in Vigo and A Coruña. The increase in landings caused a collapse in prices: in Vigo they fell by 40 percent and in A Coruña by 63 percent. Business profits were compromised by the increase in production costs. The depression of the 1930s and associated problems caused an increase in costs and difficulties with the acquisition of essential inputs, such as nets, cables or mallets, and, above all, English coal, given the policy put into effect to stimulate the consumption of very low quality Spanish coal, whose use reduced the efficiency of the fishing units. After 1931, the rising pound was an additional factor to add to the advent of the Republican regime and tough labor conflicts, which gave rise to wage increases, the introduction of a Sunday rest day, and compulsory workers’ insurance that increased labor costs by 40 percent between 1930 and 1935.34 Such was the set of factors that led the sector into a notable contraction in the 1930s. The majority of industry participants were affected by serious

32 Russell, O problema da sobrepesca, 33. 33 Biard, “Querelles de chaluts,” 8–19; Mahe, Petite Histoire, 64–65; Moulinier, La Pêche industrielle, 113–124; Eiroa, A pesca profesional, 173–176; López, “Recursos naturales,” 157–209. 34 Giráldez, Crecimiento y transformación, 319–343; López, “Recursos naturales, derechos de propiedad,” 157–209.

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financial problems, dragging many into bankruptcy. The crisis directly affected the fleet by preventing necessary investments. The possibility of renewal was halted just at a time when the remoteness of fishing grounds required more efficient units, with a greater range of action, speed, and load capacity. The Galician fleet on the eve of the Civil War was an aging fleet that did not adapt well to working conditions in more productive and distant fishing grounds. Moreover, its steam-powered wooden hull boats needed to be replaced by diesel engine steel hulled boats, all of which was deferred for many decades by the adverse economic situation.

Conclusions The forces that drove the development of Galician fishing from the late nineteenth century onwards were similar to those seen in other countries. The growth of demand stemming from the development of the canning industry led to the modernization of surface fishing, while the railway connection with the urban centers of the interior of the peninsula stimulated the demand for table species. Market expansion encouraged more intense fishing through the adoption of new techniques. The basic transformations were completed in the first decade of the twentieth century as mechanical traction in surface fishing and bottom trawling spread. The growth of the trawling fleet was reflected in an increase in catches and a progressive fall in prices for the principal species, due to the limited nature of the domestic market and the intense competition aroused. Fishing yields were quickly affected. Looking for more productive fishing grounds and more profitable markets, many of the Galician trawlers moved to other areas like the Cantabrian, South-Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts. This process favored the formation of local supply oligopolies and encouraged some companies to integrate vertically, from the production phase to retail sales. After the contraction during the first years of the First World War, the sector experienced spectacular expansion. The rise in prices and demand for fish made for a significant accumulation of capital that came to fruition after 1918 in a rapid increase in the size of the fleet and number of landings. However, after a brief period of exceptional results, due to the lower intensity of fishing in traditional fishing grounds during the years of the conflict, those extraordinary benefits did not take long to disappear. The continued fall in productivity stimulated a new phase of expansion for the fishing companies, first towards the North African banks and, some time later, towards the Celtic Sea. In this regard, we must consider that in the scarce, depleted waters of the traditional Galician fishing grounds

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at the beginning of the 1920s, the industry would have entered an extreme situation, with the fishing units working below the profitability threshold. The stagnation in, or fall in, physical catches, the existence of solid demand, and the maintenance or growth of the fishing effort point towards the premises raised by Franquesa when identifying a historical situation such as relative overfishing.35 This does not imply that the reproductive capacity of the resource was compromised, but that, with the technology available, the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) would have been reached. Since then, each increase in fishing effort would correspond to a lower yield, and also with a lessening in the growth of total catch, a conjuncture in which the equilibrium point would already be located on the decreasing slope of the income function. However, the propagation of technological innovations would allow access to previously inaccessible depths, masses, strata or species, generating an effect similar to the expansion of existing fishing areas, permitting an increase in catches and establishing a new MSY. In the end, the historical trajectory of the fishing industry will eventually lead to a situation of absolute overfishing. Nevertheless, for the time frame we are dealing with, it was not the depletion of resources, but the effects fishing efforts had on the income of the shipowners that caused the expansion of Galician fishing towards new fishing grounds and more profitable areas.

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35 Franquesa, “Teories sobre.”

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Robinson, Robb. Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996. Robinson, Robb. “The Evolution of Railway Fish Traffic Policies, 1840–66.” Journal of Transport History 7 (1986): 32–43. Russell, E. S. O problema da sobrepesca. Lisboa: Estação de Biología Marítima, 1943. Sahrhage, Dietrich, and Joannes Lundbeck. A History of Fishing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992. Sinde, Ana I. “El transporte de pescado en España y el problema de los vagones frigoríficos 1890–1950.” In Siglo y medio de ferrocarril en España, 1848–1998: Economía, industria y sociedad, edited by Joaquin Vidal, Miguel Muñoz, and Jesús Sanz, 771–786. Alicante: Diputación Provincial de Alicante, 1999. Sinde, Ana I. “Estrategia de crecimiento y formas de integración en la empresa pesquera gallega: 1900–1960.” Madrid: Fundación de Empresa Pública. ftp://ftp.fundacionsepi. es/phe/hdt2002.pdf. Sinde, Ana I. “El abastecimiento de pescado fresco en Barcelona: 1890–1941: Una primera aproximación,” Paper presented at the XI Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Historia Económica, Madrid, September, 11–12, 2014. Starkey, David J., and Ingo Heidbrink, eds. A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twenty-First Century. Bremen: Hauschild, 2012. Varela, Manuel. Procesos de producción en el sector pesquero en Galicia. Santiago: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1985. Wilcox, Martin. “Railways, Roads and the British White Fish Industry.” Business History 54 (2012): 741–764.

Inês Amorim

2 The Social Dilemmas of the Portuguese Sardine: Overfishing, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Communities in the Late Nineteenth Century The current debate about the collapse of the sardine stock, in particular the mandatory seasonal controls on sardine capture, emphasizes the importance of historical knowledge to our understanding of the fashionable concepts of overfishing and fisheries sustainability. It entails a scientific approach to the technological evolution, political management and history of destruction, competition, and contradictory actions that marked the roles of fishers and scientists in the growing footprint of fisheries exploitation and ecological degradation.1 Portugal is at the centre of this debate due to its maritime position. Its coast forms part of the Bay of Biscay and the Iberian Coast, which is Region IV in the five areas designated in 1994 by the OSPAR Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic. In the scheme devised by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) in 1902, Portugal’s fishing interests sit within Sub-area VIII, the Bay of Biscay (a. North, b. Central, c. South, d. Offshore Division, e. West), and Sub-area IX Portuguese Waters (a. East Division, b. West). It is a particular oceanographic area, extending from 48°N to 36°N and from 11°W to the coastlines of France, Portugal, and Spain,2 clearly distinct from the rest of the Atlantic, both in ecological and in socioeconomic and cultural terms. France, Spain, and Portugal have a number of common characteristics, such as the structural dependency of fish consumption and processing industry. The continental shelf is narrow and runs parallel to the coast (varying between 8 and 70 km square), and is populated by a predominance of coastal pelagic species (near the surface or medium-depth: e.g. sardine, horse mackerel, anchovy etc.), with some demersal fish (deep-water: e.g. hake, etc.) and migratory oceanic species, notably tuna (see Map 2.1).3 In the 1880s, this area was the scene of a scientific, economic, and political debate regarding the lack of sardine on the French coast, which focused on the dynamic interplay of anthropogenic and natural factors in the evolution of marine

1 McKenzie, “The Widening Gyre,” 293–305. 2 Bay of Biscay and the Iberian Coast Ecoregion, 1–16. 3 Brito, Portugal, perfil geográfico, 180. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-003

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Map 2.1: Natural aspects of the Portuguese coast.

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resources. The questions were: what are the reasons for this problem, and who is responsible? Was it the state and its regulatory control, or lack of control, over the growing commercial importance of fishing, particularly the sardine fishery? Did the intensive fishing of a stock inevitably lead to overfishing – taking from a fish stock more than a maximum sustainable yield – making the business unprofitable and no longer worthwhile? Historical perspectives on fisheries exploitation are core issues in more recent literature, with past indicators used to evaluate marine environmental evolution,4 in particular the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life and the anthropogenic and ecological explanation for its evolution. The problem is how to measure sustainability with proxy data (when the quality of indicators was irregular) as well as the real impact of scientific knowledge in resource management. Furthermore, if the state is not the only credible agent in the management of common resources, a more accurate analysis of the activities of fishers – who are frequently accused of being depredators – and how they are integrated in the large frame of overfishing is required.5 This chapter evaluates the impact of the often-mentioned French sardine crisis, seen through Portuguese eyes in a comparative approach. The overlapping and interactive roles of scientific research, state regulation, sardine landings, and fishing communities are considered in the construction of this history.

Stock Fluctuation, Scientific Research, and the French Sardine “Race″ The debate about the rational management of fish stocks in the sardine case revolved around three points: the behaviour of the species,6 the irregularity of catches, and the fishers’ actions under the surveillance of States. This is why scientific research, like oceanic expeditions and biological laboratories, formed part of a conservationist and rationalist sea management in the North Atlantic during the late nineteenth century, and then in the Pacific in the early twentieth century.7 France invested in marine laboratories at Arcachon (laboratory-aquarium, 1866),

4 5 6 7

Klein and Thurstan, “Perspectives in Ocean Past,” 11. Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 15. Durand, “La crise sardinière française,” 26–35. Finley, “Political History,” 191.

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Roscoff (1881), Wimereux (1873), and Banyuls-sur-Mer (1881).8 Naples was early into the field and was seen as a model,9 while Monaco,10 Denmark,11 Portugal,12 and Spain all developed their marine science interests.13 This European model of seaside laboratory and aquarium formed the basis for evaluations of the biology of the sea and the pathology of species’ research that gathered pace in the 1930s.14 The way fisheries fluctuated was one of the major issues that the Norwegian Johan Hjort (1869–1948; fisheries scientist, marine zoologist and oceanographer) studied. His Fluctuations in the Great Fisheries of Northern Europe (1914), mostly dedicated to cod and herring fisheries, discussed in detail the French sardine crisis. According to his analysis, French landings fell from over 50 million kilos in 1898 to below 30 million kilos in 1899, plummeting to less than 9 million kilos in 1902. Hjort used this case to explain fluctuations in catches, which started with the fact that the fish were not found in the coastal waters in a regular way: “The theory of migrations had a plausible explanation furnished by the suggestion that the fish in such poor years neglected, wholly or in part, to visit the usual grounds.”15 The crise sardinière inspired a copious bibliography about sardines in the early 1930s, which was justified because the crisis was considered a disaster “to the people who depend upon it almost solely for food and employment.”16 The literature comprised theories and the facts, both scientific and commercial, pertaining to the erratic habits of sardine stocks across the globe: Sardina pilchardus (Europe), Sardina melanosticta (Japan), Sardina ocellata (South Africa), Sardina sajax (west coast of South America), and Sardina caerulea (west coast of North America). The French sardine crisis was analyzed in a comparative way, with a marked contrast drawn with the success of the California sardine fishery in economic and ecological terms after the First World War.17 Data was gathered about Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English sardine landings to provide information “regarding the manner in which the species is withstanding,” as well as natural changes in abundance, which inevitably occur, in order to evaluate

8 Debaz, Les stations françaises de biologie marine; Canadelli, “Biological stations,” 1447–1457; Kofoid, Biological Stations of Europe. 9 Dohrn, “Foundation of the Zoological Stations,” 277; Kirby, “Charles Atwood Kofoid,” 462; Goldschmidt, Charles Atwood Kofoid, 121. 10 Carpine, La Pratique de l’océanographie. 11 Poulson, Global Marine Science and Carlsberg. 12 Amorim and Pinto, “Portugal in the European Network”; Amorim, “Marine Zoology.” 13 Pérez-Rubin, “Inception and Development.” 14 Jack, “Biological Field Stations,” 11; Groeben and Fokin, “From Russia with Love,” 141–172. 15 Hjort, Fluctuations, 3–5. 16 Wheeler, Bibliography of the Sardines, 5. 17 Thompson, California Sardine.

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the effects of overfishing, and the importance of a rational and restrained exploitation management. The French case was evoked due to the “natural changes in the yield other than those due to overfishing” that nearly destroyed its dependent industry, putting the accent on the interactions between biological, technical, and economic factors. Indeed, sardine crises could be seen as scarcity crises attributable to natural causes, to technological reasons, chiefly with regard to the type of fishing gear used, or to economic factors, notably the increasing vigour of international competition and the rising cost of the fish roe used as bait. The social dimension later referred to as a “disaster” was not cited, due to the possibility of the intentional irregularity of landings by fishers, causing price rises, even in years of true sardine abundance. Besides, the loss of a near monopoly, such as the French once had, caused by Spanish and Portuguese competition would cause great distress among the fishers who had always maintained high prices to compensate for the irregularity of the sardine catch.18 Thompson’s interpretive doubts about the real reasons and impacts of French sardine fishery crises were based on a critical analysis of the frequently quoted Louis Fage Report (1920), which was a post-war reflection on the fluctuations in European sardine catches, and the comparative variability of the French, Portuguese, Spanish, and British national fisheries. Fage’s study addressed some of the main issues about the biology of European species, in particular the sardine. He posed specific questions, asking, for instance, whether the French sardine was distinct from Spanish, Portuguese, and English stocks? Was it scientifically possible to evaluate the quality of the fish caught by the French in comparison with the others? Why was sardine fishing fairly regular everywhere except along the French coast? What factors could affect the fishery’s performance?19 The research findings were based on different indicators that strongly pointed to the high quality of French sardine. A sample of sardines from different fishing areas inferred that the French sardine is distinct from its Spanish, Portuguese, and English counterparts. The argument is a paradox. In ecological terms, the spawning age of individual sardines, the temperature, the feeding (the migration of young sardines in relation to seasonal variations and the abundance of plankton) proved to be the ecological causes of French irregularity. However, regarding the selective process of capture (one or two years, for a short period), in terms of

18 Thompson, California Sardine, 35. 19 Fage, Rapport sur la sardine, 2–3.

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sardine quality the French variety has, scientifically, the higher fat dosage, a mandatory condition for a competitive international canning brand.20 The Portuguese case was the core comparative example (see Table 2.1). As Fage argued, on the Portuguese coast, where sardines from 1 to 6 years old are regularly found, if, as a result of adverse circumstances, the spawning of a given year, or the development of the young is hampered, the resulting loss will be compensated by the capture of individuals from previous and subsequent cohorts. The French case is the opposite, because in losing quantitative landings in a period of intensive feeding, a distinct “race” of high-quality fish was captured.

Table 2.1: Reasons for higher fat dosage in sardines, 1920. Fishing grounds

Spawning individuals’ years

Fisheries Results

Mediterranean France

Individuals of all ages, but principally individuals completely adult, having spawned once or several times

The regularity in return of the fishery

North of the Gironde, at Sables The sardines commonly taken are Fluctuations are d’Olonne, at Concarneau, in their second year and immature described as Douarnenez, South of the Gironde, disastrous Bayonne, and Arcachon Portuguese coast

Sardines of all ages are taken

The fishery is very stable

England

English pilchard is an adult, aged from four to eight years

The returning fisheries are remarkable for their regularity

Source: Fage, Rapport sur la sardine, 8–11.

Fage was not convinced by current biological concepts about the impact of temperature and feeding on sardine growth. However, the construction of this idea of the French sardine race was not an innocent discourse. The curious definition of the inferiority of the Iberian stocks born in this particular period was explained by the fact that the sardines caught in the warmer waters off the Iberian coast are fatter and softer. The higher temperature of the equatorial sea prevents “Spanish fish″ from seeking abundant food. In Portugal, the sardine takes the bottom taste

20 Fage, Rapport sur la sardine, 8–9.

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35

because it lives in muddy and carpeted waters, eating seaweed. On the contrary, in Brittany, where “the freshness of the water excites the appetite, the sardine is very voracious,” and consequently is the best for canning.21 Fage therefore investigated other ecological elements of the sardine’s environment. As a very well informed scientist about the first Danish oceanographic expeditions to the Mediterranean Sea and adjacent marine areas during 1908–1910, he was interested in assembling the related hydrographical and environmental parameters, meteorological observations, and spatiotemporal occurrences.22 Fage published a study of sardine reproductive dynamics in the Danish Oceanographical Report,23 describing the development of the larval stages and the distribution of species. He investigated the recruitment and population dynamics of fish, drawing upon a century of research influenced by Hjort, which contrasts with the presentday focus on climate change and the ecosystem approach.24 The current literature reflects difficulties in understanding the factors influencing fish recruitment, especially in the early life history stages that include natural mortality of the larvae and juveniles due to starvation, predation, adverse transport, habitat degradation, climate change, and overfishing to the point where reproduction is hampered. Many of these factors may contribute to the decline in spawning-stock biomass (SSB) and landings, with poor recruitment rather than overfishing accounting for its failure to recover.25 What we nowadays know about the stock of Atlanto-Iberian sardine, and possible causes in the variability of recruitment conditions,26 is that there has been an active coastal upwelling of strong intensity since the nineteenth century, a finding based on proxy analysis of 14C content of marine shells found on the Portuguese coast between 1886 and 1937.27 This provides the environmental background to the idea of the superior French sardine “race”, and to the socio-economic ramifications of fluctuations in the abundance of the fish stock.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ropers, Exposition de la Condition Économique, 188. Mavraki, “Rescuing Biogeographic Legacy Data.” Fage, Engraulidae, Clupeidae: Report. Rice and Browman, “Where has all the Recruitment Research Gone.” Able, “Temporal variation.” Robles, “The stock of Atlanto-Iberian sardine.” Soares, “Coastal Upwelling,” 1032; Fiúza, Portuguese Coastal Upwelling System, 45–71.

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The “Sardine War” and State Regulation The belief that marine resources could be overfished emerged at the end of sixteenth century, was strongly advocated during the enlightenment period, and formed part of an intensifying debate during the nineteenth century. It involved academic, scientific, and political contributions to fisheries knowledge and management, and led to competitive theories in France, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere regarding the growth of population, fish consumption, capital investment, fishers’ recruitment and mobility, technological advances, and knowledge transfer.28 The disappearance of sardines from France’s northwest coast occurred several times over the centuries, with 1725, 1745, and 1760–1774 among the black campaigns in the history of sardine fisheries. During 1846, 1852, 1858, and 1871, bad seasons were not catastrophic for the fishers because of the good selling price their catches fetched in the market. Nevertheless, when the sardine abandoned the coasts of South Brittany from 1880 until 1887, with the exception of the 1883 season, some authorities commented about the crisis, believing that sardines had taken refuge in the waters of the Iberian Peninsula.29 This led to a new narrative, in which natural and market factors combined in a particular conjunction with the adjacent Portuguese region. Indeed, it seems that the same interaction between ecological and economic explanations occurred in the Portuguese case. Historical sources indicate that there was a lack of sardines off the Portuguese coast, mainly off the Aveiro and Ílhavo shores, in 1776 and 1796, but they are clearly related to the growing demand for sardine, which, since the mid-eighteenth century was the main alternative to cod imported by the English.30 In fact, political reasons for the Seven Years War (1756–63), the American Revolutionary War (1776–83), the French Revolutionary War (1793–1801), and the establishment of the independent United States of America, as well as climatic and technological factors, impaired the English supply to Portugal. While the price of codfish increased steadily between 1764 and 1794, the product diminished in quality and was considered responsible for the general debility of the poor. Simultaneously, the introduction since the mid-eighteenth century of seine-nets from Catalonia via Galicia (artes grandes, “big arts”), as well as a new salting process, stimulated 28 Amorim, “Biologic Complex,” 47–62; Pavé, “France’s Atlantic Coastal Fisheries,” 208–228; Pavé, “Overfishing Myth,” 81–96; Carmona and Lópes Loza, “Spain’s Atlantic Coast Fisheries,” 250–278; Mejido Pardo, A Guerra pola Sardiña. 29 Meyer-Sablé, Familles de marins-pêcheurs, 22. 30 Amorim, Aveiro e sua Provedoria, 498; Starkey, “Newfoundland Trade,” 102–104.

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the internal migratory movement of Portuguese fishers from Andalusia, Catalonia, and Galicia, who were attracted by the prosperity seemingly offered by the overabundance of sardine catches and the new processing system.31 Moreover, Portugal, as well as France (the Baie salt), produced sea salt, which was mandatory material for the traditional and new business of salting sardine “like cod.”32 The impacts of this movement can be measured by comparing the 1790 and 1821 statistical returns of fishers, which increased manifold in some beaches.33 Legislation and a new political framework in the decades that followed marked a long process of institutional change, which facilitated the introduction of capital and new techniques into the fisheries. Since 1830, with the abolition of the manorial system in the fisheries (nobility, and the church, were the beneficiaries of royal rights over the coasts), the activity was opened with equality of access to all interested parties. From the theoretical point of view, the State was responsible for safeguarding the general conditions of access and usufruct of resources provided in common. In practical terms, the concessions were given to those who had more capital, providing scope for conflict and opportunities for foreigners. So, French fishers, as well as Spanish, visited Portuguese waters. Furthermore, data relating to 1880–1887 indicate a concentration of sardine on the Portuguese coast and its absence from the coasts of French Brittany, which caused greater pressure from French vessels and investments on the Portuguese and Galician coasts.34 A few years later, in 1909–1912 and 1924–1925, the disappearance of sardine from the Galician coast forced fishers and canners to resort to the Portuguese coast.35 These shifts and uncertainties explain why fisheries management, in particular of tuna and sardine, became institutionalized with the creation of a Central Fisheries Commission (Comissão Central de Pescarias, 1878) and Regional Commissions for fishing zone concessions, together with the delineation of launch spaces for mobile or trailing gear (1842, 1843, 1867, 1872–1873). In international terms, treaties with Spain (“White Books,” 1879, 1882, 1886) limited areas of exclusivity of fisheries for the two countries.36 It was a long and conflictual period, which gave rise to deep debates about fishing areas, regulation

31 Josef Cornide, Memoria sobre la pesca de sardina, 149. Amorim, Da pesca à salga da sardinha, 34. 32 Amorim, “L’industrie de la Conserverie de poisson,” 305–311. 33 Amorim, “Portuguese Fisheries,” 298. 34 Dubois, La révolution sardinière, 2114; Pimentel, Questão das Pescarias. 35 Carmona Badía, “Recursos, organizácion y tecnologia,” 134. 36 Amorim, “A sustentabilidade,” 76; Rubín y Feigl, “La institucionalización de la Oceanografía”, 233–244.

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about techniques, about old and new methods that lasted until the early twentieth century. Several surveys of the sector highlighted the goals of the national fisheries, in restoring the national high seas fisheries (codfish), resolving the problem of domestic supply, and assuring the quality and sustainability of resources, exclusively about particular areas of strong press on sardine resources (and other species).37 They were written in the context of the organization of the Division of Portuguese Coast and Lagoons in Hydraulic districts (1860), fisheries, oysters and fish farming concessions (1868), the creation of Permanent Committee on Fisheries (1888), the publication of a State of Fishing in Portugal in 1886,38 and the Inquiry of Fisheries in 1890.39 The difficulty of state control was associated with different features of the coast (shoreline, wind, depth), ecological and climate conditions, and accordingly fishing techniques (see Map 2.1). In the north, therefore, from the river Minho to the Douro, tangle-nets (tresmalhos, redes) were usually employed. In the centre, from the Douro to Nazaré, the fish were seined-hauled (arrastado) to land, while from here to the south and Algarve, depending on the coast, they may have been roundhauled, tangle-netted or seined (cercos, armações e redes).40 Intensive fishing techniques started to spread through northern and southern ports, as did steam power for vessel propulsion. In pelagic fisheries, purse seines came into play before the steam trawlers. The 1890 Inquiry put the accent on the secular continuity of French fishing techniques (the chalut) that swept the bottom causing a “lack of grass.″41 Spanish boats that came to fish at Vila Real de Santo António (south, Algarve), and Póvoa do Varzim (northwest) brought with them trawling nets on steam boats and purse seines, provoking great conflicts with Portuguese fishermen.42 Despite prohibitive legislation from 1895, the general context imposed these changes. The canning industry encouraged the capitalization of seiners operating along the entire coast, even if illegally, boosted by a favourable conjuncture. The paradox was the growth in attacks on smaller communities that lived on estuarine or lagoon catches. Calling them predators, the state and some experts criticized their ignorance in catching small fish, destroying the basis for future

37 Amorim, “A institucionalização da Oceanografia e a investigação”, 594–605. 38 Silva, Estado actual das pescas em Portugal. 39 Inquérito sobre a pesca em Portugal Continental e Ilhas no ano de 1890. 40 Silva, Estado actual das pescas em Portugal, 40. 41 Inquérito sobre pesca em Portugal, 130. 42 Amorim, “A sustentabilidade,” 83; Ríos Jiménez, “La industrialización,” 45–67; Antonio Lacomba, “El sector pesquero andaluz,” 129–150.

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reproduction.43 After all, they only caught what lived to sustain the bigger fish, a paradigm shift at the end of 1900s.

The Canning Fisheries and their Impacts on Local Communities What constituted a real fishing revolution in the nineteenth century was not so much the technique of fishing, but the preservation and processing of marketable fish, which mobilized human, economic, and industrial investment. Canned sardines were a very successful export product after the Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1861 with Britain, proved to be a driving force in the expansion of the sardine industry. The two countries agreed a reciprocal reduction in tariffs on certain products, and allowed French canned fish to be exported to the British colonies, Australia, and America, with the American Civil War playing an important role in the growth of this industry, given that for the first time, canned foods became the concern of campaign stewards.44 When the sardine abandoned the coasts of South Brittany and took refuge in the waters of the Iberian Peninsula, French investors followed the sardines, as was the case with Lorient Delaury, who in 1880 opened the first factory in the Portuguese port of Sétubal, an example followed by other industrialists. It was with the arrival of the French at Setúbal and Olhão, coming from Lorient on the French Breton coast in 1880, that the canning industry received a major boost with the introduction of the vacuum method (Appert).45 The French sardine campaign of 1888 resulted in a good yield, but the crisis persisted. Therefore, what was called the “sardine crisis” was not so much linked to the temporary disappearance of the raw material as to the new market conditions. Spanish and Portuguese factories did not stop canning goods because sardines returned to French shores. On the contrary, the number of the Portuguese (and Spanish) canning factories had increased. While Breton producers insisted their products were top quality (the “French race”), the price they charged remained higher, which was a competitive disadvantage now that they had lost their monopoly position in the market.

43 Amorim, “A sustentabilidade,” 102–107. 44 Meyer-Sablé, Familles de marins-pêcheurs, 22. 45 Quintas, Setúbal, Economia, Sociedade.

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The growth in the number of Iberian canning fisheries, which largely explained the development of the industry, is clear in the French statistics. In 1871, there were 160 factories in France, seven in Spain and only one in Portugal. In 1884, there were 130 in France, 40 in Spain and 20 in Portugal. In 1886, there were 100 factories in Brittany as against 123 in Spain and Portugal,46 which underlines the collapse of the French canning industry.47 These numbers do not entirely cohere with Portuguese statistics (see Table 2.2), but they generally move in the same direction, with significant growth due to the demands of Great War, 1914–1918. Table 2.2: Numbers of canning factories in Portugal, 1884–1922. Year

Number of factories

































Source: Boletim dos organismos económicos. Barbosa, Sobre a Indústria de conservas. Cordeiro, A indústria Conserveira em Matosinhos.

Following the surge in canneries in the 1880s, there was more modest expansion in the 1890s. The First World War accelerated consumption in general, while local factors, such as the disappearance of sardine from the Galician coasts in 1909–1912 and 1924–1925, forced canners to come to the Portuguese coast.48 By 1910, the industry represented 7 percent of exports, rising to 20.5% in 1930–1935.49 Comparisons between Portuguese and French sardine landings demonstrate the loss of significance of French landings (see Table 2.3).

46 47 48 49

Meyer-Sablé, Familles de marins-pêcheurs, 26. Fichou, “La crise sardinière”; Ropers, Exposition de la Condition Économique. Carmona Badía, “Recursos, organizácion y tecnologia,” 255. Simões, Pescarias e conservas de peixe, 21.

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Table 2.3: Sardine landings in Portugal and France, 1894–1920 (tons). Year

A – Portugal

B – France



,



,

B as a % of A



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.



,

,

.

Source: Mendes and Borges, A sardinha no século XX, 22.

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With the exception of 1896–1898, French catches never recovered and Portugal remained in the ascendancy. The evidence of sardine landings points to a change in the distribution of the main Portuguese fishing ports. In 1913, the port of Matosinhos in the north of Portugal alone accounted for 50 percent of the total national catch, ahead of Peniche, Portimão, and Vila Real de S. António.50 The connection with the new geography of canning is interrelated. To briefly summarise, until the 1930s, the largest number of factories were located (from south to the north of Portuguese coast) in the Algarve (Vila Real de Santo António, Olhão, Portimão), in Setúbal (the earliest and largest canning centre until 1910s), Peniche, Espinho, Aveiro, Matosinhos, and Póvoa de Varzim.51 One notable aspect of this industrial canning improvement was the increase in the number of women working in the processing industry. In general, and with respect to the female work, based on documentary information from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries,52 Portuguese women engaged in three areas as far as work is concerned: on land; preparing the nets, preserving and selling fish; and in fish processing. The presence of women in canning factories not only indicates their adaptive capacity, but also their cost advantage, since they were paid half the rate earned by males employed in equivalent jobs, and worked without prescribed working hours.53 Their primary task was to prepare the fish before it decayed, the number of hours they spent in the factories fluctuating according to the amount of sardine or mackerel the bosses placed on the market. When, in 1907, the Portuguese state decreed a mandatory rest day, the factory owners in the canning centre of Setubal did not ratify the ordinance as it applied to their female workers, and continued impassively to order them to work at the stalls, even on Sundays.54 In 1911, the measure was reiterated and a “regulation” was introduced, which obliged women to work on Sundays and holidays when work was available. Moreover, their weekly rest of 24 consecutive hours was permitted, but only in accordance with the industry’s special nature. The growth in female employment in Galicia followed a similar pattern for the same reasons. In essence, the canning industries that survived were those that combined technological advances, like the Massó system imported from Vigo, Galicia,55 and a significant percentage of women, as was the case of Matosinhos.

50 Barbosa, Sobre a Indústria de conservas. 51 Quintas, Setúbal, Economia, Sociedade; Rodrigues, Empresas e empresários. 52 Amorim, História do trabalho e das ocupações, 50–54. 53 Amorim, “Mulheres no sector das pescas,” 661–683. 54 Valente, “Os Conserveiros de Setúbal,” 626–629. 55 Tato, Livro Memória, 42–44.

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Closing Remarks This chapter takes into account a highly important aspect of the integration of precapitalist formulations of the fisheries into the market system, as well as its impact on ecological awareness. Comparing Portugal with France and Galicia is basic to an understanding of this element of the global history of industrialization, of state organisation and perceptions about what was a “crisis” (the erratic behaviour of sardines in coastal waters), and a “disaster” for the fishers whose employment (and food) largely depended on the sardine’s behaviour. Moreover, the French “spectre” of a sardine calamity was always present and justifies comparative research into conflicts between countries (Spain and Portugal for the delimitation of its territorial waters), regarding the advance of more and more efficient techniques. However, it should be noted that the seasonal nature of fishing, and its ecological constraints, are fundamental to the organisational models that evolved in the fisheries, and the impact this had on its sustainability in an international frame. At that time, consciousness of the vulnerability of sardines justified several scientific studies, including one by an American organisation relating to French sardine crises. A climate/ecological approach is much more difficult to prove, but it seems that Portuguese coastal conditions for sardine abundance (upwelling) were attractive to French and Spanish fishers due to the lack of local sardine stocks, or due to overfishing in the context of the rapid expansion of canning. If the development of sectors downstream from the fisheries, such as canning, heightened the exclusivity of work in the sector, it offered an opportunity to develop an ecological conscience regarding the limits of fish resources as canning exports rapidly expanded. Simultaneously, fishing ports and canning factories were interconnected, and with a female workforce shaping the new industry, domestic work was transformed into factory work. Finally, in addressing the sardine crisis, and the associated tension with Portugal, the French frequently evoked the superior quality of the French sardine “race.” But the catch data proves that there had been a paradigm shift. Against this ideological construction, with fiscal measures to protect the French canning sector, the real growth in the number of canning settlements in Portugal (and Spain) was based on Portuguese catches that since 1900s were almost four times more than those of its rival.

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Bibliography Able, K. W., T. M Grothues, J. M Morson, and K. E. Coleman. “Temporal Variation in Winter Flounder Recruitment at the Southern Margin of their Range: Is the Decline due to Increasing Temperatures?” ICES Journal of Marine Science 71 (2014): 2186–2197. Amorim, Inês, and Bruno Pinto. “Portugal in the European Network of Marine Science Heritage and Outreach (19th–20th Centuries).” Humanities 8 (2019). doi:10.3390/h8010014. Amorim, Inês. “The Biologic Complex: Fisheries Science and an Enlightened Perspective at the End of the Eighteenth Century. ” In Human and Environmental Interactions in the Development of the North Atlantic Fisheries, edited by Robb Robinson, 47–62. Hull: North Atlantic Fisheries History Association, 2015. Amorim, Inês. “A institucionalização da Oceanografia e a investigação pesquira em Portugal na 2a metadade do século XIX-O laboratório marítimo de Aveiro.” In 1° Congresso LusoBrasileiro de História da Ciência e da Técnica, 594–605. Évora: Universidade de Évora, 2001. Amorim, Inês. “A sustentabilidade dos recursos piscatórios em Portugal na 2a metade do século XIX: manter a pesca, e/ou conservar o peixe – um quadro conflitual.” In Atas do I Encontro Internacional de História Ambiental Lusófona, edited by Inês Amorim and Stefania Barca, 69–133. Coimbra: CES, 2013. Amorim, Inês. “Da pesca à salga da sardinha.” In A indústria portuense em perspectiva histórica, 25–43. Porto: CLC- FLUP, 1998. Amorim, Inês. “L’industrie de la Conserverie de poisson au Portugal et l’utilisation du sel. “In Sels et salines de L’Europe Atlantique, edited by Loïs Ménanteau, 305–311. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018. Amorim, Inês. “Mulheres no sector das pescas na viragem do século XIX.“ Arquipélago História 2a série, IX-X (2005–2006): 661–683. Amorim, Inês. “Portuguese Fisheries, c.1100–1830.” In A History of North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, edited by David J. Starkey, Jón Th. Thor, and Ingo Heidbrink, 279–298. Bremen: Verlag H.M.Hauschild GmbH, 2009. Amorim, Inês. 2009. “Marine Zoology: the Second Half of the 19th century in Portugal.” In Studia Atlantica 13, 42–59. Bergen: Museum Vest, 2009. Amorim, Inês. Aveiro e sua Provedoria no século XVIII (1690–1814) – estudo económico de um espaço histórico. Coimbra: CCRC, vol.1, 1997. Amorim, Inês. História do trabalho e das ocupações, vol. II – As pescas. Coordinated by Nuno Madureira. Oeiras: Celta, 2001. Antonio Lacomba, Juan. “El sector pesquero andaluz en el último cuarto del xix: una fase de cambios y transformaciones. Una aproximación.” Revista de estudios regionales n° 75 (2006): 129–150. Barbosa, António Manuel Pinto. Sobre a Indústria de conservas em Portugal. Lisboa: Editorial Império, 1941. Bay of Biscay and Iberian Coast Ecoregion. ICES Ecosystem Overviews. December 14, 2018 https://doi.org/10.17895/ices.pub.4666. Boletim dos organismos económicos criados pelo ministério do comércio e indústria, n° 2 vol.1. Porto: Imprensa Moderna, 1935. Brito, Raquel Soeiro de. Portugal, perfil geográfico. Lisboa: Estampa, 1994.

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Canadelli, Elena. ″Biological Stations and the Study of Marine Life: Umberto D’Ancona and the Hydrobiological Station of Chioggia (1940–1964).” ICES Journal of Marine Science 73 (2015): 1447–1457. 2015 doi: 10.1093/icesjms/fsv209. Carmona Badía, Jóam. “O mar e a Industrialización de Galicia.” In Galicia fai dous mil anos, o feito diferencial galego, 251–271. v.2 Historia. Santiago de Compostela: Museo do Pobo Galego, 1997. Carmona, Jóam, and Ernesto Lópes Losa. “Spain’s Atlantica Coast Fisheries, c. 1100–1850.” In A History of North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 1: From Early Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, edited by David J. Starkey, Jón Th. Thór, and Ingo Heidbrink, 250–278. Bremen: Verlag H.M.Hauschild GmbH, 2009. Carpine, Christian. La Pratique de l’océanographie au temps du Prince Albert I. Monaco: Musée Océanographique, 2002. Cordeiro, José M. Lopes. A indústria Conserveira em Matosinhos. Exposição de Arqueologia Industrial um século de indústria no Norte, 1834–1933: o génio dos engenhos. Porto: Associação Industrial Portuense, 1999. Crocker, Piers. “Brisling Sardines, Kippered Herring and Fishballs: Activity at the Norwegian Research Laboratory for the Canning Industry 1931–35.” In Studia Atlantica 13, 60–74. Bergen: Museum Vest, 2009. Debaz, Josquin. Les stations françaises de biologie marine et leurs périodiques entre 1872 et 1914. These pour obtenir le grade de docteur de Histoire, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Paris: Hal-Archives ouvertes.fr., 2005. Dohrn, Anton. “The Foundation of the Zoological Stations.” Nature 5 (1872): 277–280. Dubois, Xavier. La révolution sardinière: Pêcheurs et conserveurs en Bretagne Sud au XIX siècle. Rennes: PUR, 2004. Durand, Marie-Helene. “La crise sardinière française: les premières recherches scientifiques autour d’une crise économique et sociale.” In Pêcheries ouest africaines: variabilité, instabilité et changement, edited by Philipe Cury and Claude Roy, 26–35. Paris: Groupes de Travail du Dakar – Casablanca, 1988. Fage, M. Louis. “Engraulidae, Clupeidae: Report on the Danish oceanographical expeditions 1908–10 to the Mediterranean and adjacent seas.” V2 Biology (A9). Copenhagen: Høst & Son, 1920. Fage, M. Louis. Rapport sur la sardine: Notes et mémoires. Angers: Office scientifique et technique des pêches maritimes Gaultier et Thébert, 1920. Fichou, Jean-Christophe. “La crise sardinière de 1902–1913 au cœur des affrontements religieux en Bretagne. “ Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 116–4 (2009). Accessed April 30, 2019, doi: 10.4000/ abpo.639. Finley, Mary Carmel. “A Political History of Maximum Sustained Yield, 1945–1955.” In Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, edited by David J. Starkey, Poul Holm, and Michaela Barnard, 189–206. London: Earthscan, 2007. Fiúza, A. F. G. The Portuguese Coastal Upwelling System: Actual Problems of Oceanography in Portugal. Lisboa: JNICT, 1982. Goldschmidt, Richard B. Charles Atwood Kofoid, 1865–1947. A Biographical Memoir. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1951. Groeben, Christiane, and Sergei Fokin. “From Russia with Love: Russian Scientists at the Naples Zoological Station (1874–1934).” In Places, People and Tools. Oceanography in the Mediterranean and Beyond, edited by Christiane Groeben, 141–172. Napoli: Giannini Editore, 2013.

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Hjort, Johan. Fluctuations in the Great Fisheries of Northern Europe: Viewed in the Light of Biological Research. Copenhagen: Conseil permanent international pour 1ʹexploration de la mer, 1914. Inquérito sobre a pesca em Portugal Continental e Ilhas no ano de 1890. Lisboa: Ministério da Marinha, 1890. Jack, Homer A. “Biological Field Stations of the World.” In Chronica Botanica: An International Collection in the Method and History of Biology and Agriculture, Volume 9, number 1, edited by Frans Verdoorn. Massachusetts, 1945. Josef Cornide, D. Memoria sobre la pesca de sardina en las costas de Galicia, 1774. Santiago de Compostela: Consello de Cultura Galega, 1997. Kirby, Harold. “Charles Atwood Kofoid 1865–1947.” Science 106 (1947): 462–463. Klein, Emily S., and Ruth H. Thurstan. “Acknowledging Long-Term Ecological Change: the Problem of Shifting Baselines.” In Perspectives on Oceans Past, edited by Kathleen Schwertner Máñez and Bo Poulson, 11–29. Berlin: Springer, 2016. Kofoid, Charles Atwood. The Biological Stations of Europe. Washington: United States Bureau of Education Bulletin 4, 1914. Kunstler, J. La question sardinière et la crise aquicole en génerale. Bordeaux: Imprimerie Gounouihou, 1904. Mavraki D., L. Fanini, M. Tsompanou, V. Gerovasileiou, S. Nikolopoulou, E. Chatzinikolaou, W. Plaitis, et al. “Rescuing Biogeographic Legacy Data: The ‘Thor’ Expedition, A Historical Oceanographic Expedition to the Mediterranean Sea.” Biodiversity Data Journal (2016): 4–11054. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e11054. McKenzie, Matthew. “‘The Widening Gyre’: Rethinking the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Collapse, 1850–2000.” In A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries History, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twenty-First Century, edited by David J. Starkey and Ingo Heidbrink, 293–305. Bremen: Verlag H. M. Hauschild GmbH, 2012. Mejido Pardo, Maria Luisa. A Guerra pola Sardiña. Preito Galego-catalán sobre artes de pesca nas costas da Galicia desde 1750 a 1890. Santiago de Compostela: Xunta da Galicia, 2002. Mendes, Hugo Vilela, and Maria de Fátima Borges. A sardinha no século XX: Capturas e esforço de pesca. Relatórios do INIAP. Lisboa: INIP, 2006. Meyer-Sablé, Nathalie. Familles de marins-pêcheurs et évolution des pêches. Littoral morbihannais 1830–1920. Paris: L’Hartmattan, 2005. OSPAR Commission 2000. Quality Status Report 2000. London: OSPAR Commission, 2000. http://www.ospar.org. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pavé, Marc. “France’s Atlantic Coastal Fisheries, c.1600–1850.” In A History of North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 1: From Early Times to Mid-Nineteenth Century, edited by David J. Starkey, Jón Th. Thor, and Ingo Heidbrink, 208–228. Bremen: Verlag H.M.Hauschild GmbH, 2009. Pavé, Marc. “The Overfishing Myth in the Administration of France’s Coastal Fisheries, 1715–1850.″ In Conflict, Overfishing and Spatial Expansion in the North Atlantic Fisheries, c.1400–2000, edited by David J. Starkey, Daniel Thorleifsen, and Robb Robinson, 81–96. Hull: North Atlantic Fisheries History Association, 2008.

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Pérez-Rubin, Juan. “Inception and Development of Oceanographic Chemistry in Spain (1911–1931).” In Places, People and Tools: Oceanography in the Mediterranean and Beyond, edited by Christiane Groeben, 49–62. Napoli: Giannini Editore, 2013. Pimentel, Alberto. A Questão das Pescarias. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1981. Poulson, Bo. Global Marine Science and Carlsberg: The Golden Connection of Johames Schmidt (1877–1933). Leiden: Brill, 2016. Quintas, Maria da Conceição. Setúbal, Economia, Sociedade e Cultura Operária, 1880–1930. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1998. Rice, J., and H. I. Browman. “Where has all the Recruitment Research Gone, Long Time Passing?” ICES Journal of Marine Science 71 (2014): 2293–2299. Ríos, Jiménez. “La industrialización de la pesca en la provincia de Huelva (1800–1930).” Historia Agraria. Revista de Agricultura e Historia Rural 28 (2002): 45–67. Robinson, Robb. Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996. Robles R., C. Porteiro, and J. M. Cabanas, “The Stock of Atlanto-Iberian Sardine: Possible Causes of Variability.” Rapp. P.-V. Reun. Cons. Int. Explor. Mer., 195, 418–423. Rodrigues, Manuel Ferreira. Empresas e empresários das indústrias transformadoras na subregião da Ria de Aveiro, 1864–1931. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, FCT. 2010. Ropers, Louis. Exposition de la Condition Économique et Sociale Du Pêcheur Sardinier. Paris: Imprimerie Bonvalot-Jouve, 1906. Rubín y Feigl, Juan Pérez de. “La institucionalización de la Oceanografía y de la investigación pesquera en España (1830–1915).” In VII Congresso Internacional da Sociedade Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas, 233–244. T.I. Pontevedra: Sociedade Espanhola das Ciências e das Técnicas, 2001. Silva, A. A. Baldaque da. Estado actual das pescas em Portugal, comprehendendo a pesca marítima, fluvial e lacustre em todo o continente do Reino, referido no anno de 1886. Lisboa: Imprensa Régia, 1891. Simões, Nuno. Pescarias e conservas de peixe: notas sobre a evolução do seu comércio. Lisboa: Separata Indústria Portuguesa, 1939. Soares, António M. Monge. “Coastal Upwelling and Radiocarbon: A Case Study.” In Littoral 94 Proceedings, Volume 2: 1031–1032. Porto: Eurocast Portugal, 1994. Souto, Henrique. Comunidadades de Pesca Artesanal na Costa Portuguesa. Estudo geográfico. Lisboa: UNL, 1998. Starkey, David J. “The Newfoundland Trade.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, 102–104. London: Chatham Publishing, 2000. Tato, Josué. Livro Memória da indústria conserveira de Matosinhos, Leça da Palmeira e Perafita, 1899–2007. Matosinhos: Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos, 2007. Thompson, Will F. The California Sardine: And the Study of the Available Supply. UC California State Fisheries Laboratory, Fish Bulletin No. 11. San Diego: Library – Scripps Collection, 1926. Valente, Vasco Pulido. “Os Conserveiros de Setúbal 1887–1901.” Análise Social XVII (1981): 626–629. Wheeler, Genevieve Corwin. A Bibliography of the Sardines. UC California State Fisheries Laboratory, Fish Bulletin No. 36. San Diego: Library – Scripps Collection, 1931.

Frits Loomeijer

3 Between Brussels and the Biologists: The Roots of the Dutch Overfishing Issue In May 1973, the Landbouw Economisch Instituut (LEI) published a short report on the future development of the Dutch inshore fisheries.1 Based on 1972 catch, value, fleet, and crew figures, a forecast until 1982 was presented. Though the economists emphasized that their growth model was hypothetical, and it was unlikely that the boom of the past decade would continue at the same level, only one sentence concerned the possibility of future government restrictions on catches. “The risk of a shortage of oil” and rise in energy costs was only mentioned once.2 Six months later, the “First Oil Crisis” struck western economies, particularly energy intensive sectors like the fishing industry. A year later, all Dutch fishermen had been confronted with a new concept: assigning of quotas. This meant, in their opinion, unnecessary and unfair catch restrictions and loss of freedom, imposed by bureaucrats in Brussels and based on the research of biologists who did not understand the sea. Does this mean that in the early 1970s nobody in the Netherlands was aware of the critical situation of the North Sea fisheries? Not at all. This LEI report was intended as a warning against overfishing and increasing catch capacity, especially with regard to the flat fish fleet. But few expected a substantial structural change in the energy supply, at least not in the Netherlands where the rapid increase in the standard of living since the early 1960s had in large part been based on its rich natural gas reserve. The Dutch economy as a whole had become energy intensive. Also, few expected radical governmental measures, whether short term, nationally or within the framework of the EEC. Looking back it makes one wonder. There were plenty of warnings. North Sea herring stocks were at an historic low. In 1971, the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) issued the first fish quota ever for these stocks. Experts published alarming articles. In 1972, a total catch capacity of the beam trawl fleet of 90,000 hp was sufficient to harvest the maximum catch of sole, being the most expensive and profitable species for Dutch fishermen.3 However, by that time the total capacity of the flatfish fleet had already reached 200,000 hp

1 Davidse, Ontwikkeling in de kleine zeevisserij. The LEI is the Dutch state economic research institute for agriculture and fisheries. 2 Davidse, Ontwikkeling in de kleine zeevisserij, 8. 3 Davidse, Ontwikkeling in de kleine zeevisserij, 12. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-004

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and on top of that, about 100 larger, and far more powerful vessels, had been ordered. In a broader perspective, the first two environment laws were coming into force in 1970.4 Two years later, the Club of Rome published its report, “The Limits to Growth,” and this caused an ongoing discussion in the politically active sections of western societies, the Dutch included. So, in the early 1970s, environmental awareness was growing fast. Overfishing was a well-known and intensively studied phenomenon, both nationally and internationally. But neither the Dutch fishing industry nor the government had any clue as to how to deal with it. Both would persevere in their sustained effort to enhance efficiency and economic growth. It would take almost two decades before government and industry overcame their inability to create a constructive mode of operation. Half a century later, the Dutch fishing fleet has been diminished. The number of Dutch fishermen has dropped to under 1000. However, the industry as a whole has hardly lost volume and value, while fish processing and the fish trade have grown. The Netherlands has become the European fish hub. The three remaining deep-sea trawler companies are amongst the biggest in the world. As global players in both pelagic and demersal fish, they dominate their former British, German, French, and Portuguese competitors. And yet, the majority of the inshore fishermen still feel trapped between government and experts, between Brussels and the biologists. This chapter explores the roots of this complicated relationship.

Overfishing In The Netherlands, genuine worries about declining fish stocks, based on academic research, first appeared in the 1960s. Traditionally, systematic fisheries research was primarily focused on the behavior of fish, in order to optimize catch methods.5 Generally speaking, marine biologists regarded themselves as the natural allies of fishermen. Governments were primarily interested in growth in terms of food production, employment, export, and foreign currency reserves. That lasted until the last quarter of the twentieth century.

4 Van Zanden, Een klein land, 225. 5 In 1888, Dr. P.P.C. Hoek was appointed Scientific Advisor of Fisheries Affairs at the Ministry of Industry and Trade. He belonged to the international circle of marine biologists who initiated ICES in 1902.

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In fact, little was known about the Dutch fishing industry in general, not only according to present standards, but also in comparison with, for instance, the contemporary manufacturing industry and the agricultural sector. Though annual production figures in weight and value of registered fish landings had been published since the early twentieth century, real insight into the economic performance of the different sectors of the industry did not emerge until after the Second World War. When in 1946, a fisheries department was established within the LEI, its director, A.G.U. Hildebrandt, wrote that systematic research pertaining to business economics had not been undertaken before. In the case of the inshore fisheries, he used a polite understatement, saying that it was not even possible because the books of 70 percent of the skipper-owners were not available for research.6 In essence, he made it clear that nobody understood a poverty-stricken sector that two decades later would have become a booming business on an unprecedented level.

Structure of the Dutch Fleet In order to understand the post-war development of the Dutch fishing industry, it is necessary to analyze its structure. From the early seventeenth century onwards, the herring fisheries were described as the “Great Fishery” because of their economic importance to the young Republic. However, by the nineteenth century, this had become the designation for what was regarded as the distant water fisheries; that is, fishing North Sea, English Channel, Norwegian, and Icelandic waters. All other activities near the Dutch coast and in the Wadden Zee, Zuider Zee, and the Zeeland delta were defined as inshore fisheries. When the steam trawl sector emerged as a new phenomenon in the 1890s, it was regarded as a part of the “Great Fishery.”7 Over the course of the early twentieth century, this term was no longer used, and in subsequent decades three terms covered the sea fisheries: herring fisheries (drift net), trawl fisheries (based in IJmuiden), and inshore fisheries. In the 1950s and 1960s, the latter developed from working within the three-mile zone into a true North Sea fishery, including Skagerrak and the English Channel. Though not immediately in practice, the introduction of the EEC Common Fishery Policy (CFP) in 1984 was a formal watershed in the development of the post-war Dutch fishing industry. At the same time, a process of concentration and scaling up in the herring and trawl fisheries was in full swing. At the turn

6 Hildebrandt, “Het economisch onderzoek in de visserij,” 138. 7 Hoogendijk, De grootvisscherij, VI.

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of the millennium not one of the former IJmuiden trawler companies existed as a shipowner. From the many smaller companies in the herring sector, four had developed into shipowners/fish processors/wholesalers and retailers operating on a global scale. In this chapter, the internationally accepted terms “inshore” and “distant water fisheries” will be used. Figure 3.1 indicates how they were, or were not, interrelated in the period from roughly 1900 until today. Unlike the inshore sector, vertical chain organization by combining fishing, wholesale, and even retail has a long tradition in the distant water fisheries. Besides that, the distant water fisheries have long since produced more than the home market could absorb. The herring sector was based on exports. From the late nineteenth century onwards, when tram, train, and improved roads put an end to the isolation of

Figure 3.1: Sectors of the Dutch fishing industry since 1900.

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many fishing communities, the inshore sector also became increasingly important for exports (see Map 3.1). Around 1910, more than half of the total fish, shellfish and crustacean production of the Dutch fleet was exported. Around 100 years later, these figures are proportionately the same.

Market and Fleet in the Mid-Twentieth Century By 1949, the performance of the West European fishing industry, in terms of kilos landed, had improved by roughly 70 percent since 1913, which was one of the peak years before the First World War. The biggest increases were evident in Germany (160 percent), Sweden (175 percent), Denmark (292 percent), Iceland (328 percent), and Belgium (500 percent). In absolute terms, Norway and Britain were by far the market leaders, together landing almost half of the total of 4.75 million tons in 1949. Belgium, with 68 million kilos, or 1.5 percent, contributed least to the West European total catch, while The Netherlands was about average, both in growth rate (60 percent) and as to kilos landed (236 million).8 However, a closer analysis of the state of the Dutch inshore and distant water fisheries offers a far less positive picture. In short, the fleet was out of date, while there was little capital available for modernization, the productivity of the main fishing grounds in the North Sea was declining sharply after a short increase directly after the war, and the level of education of the fishermen, especially those in the inshore sector, was insufficient for up to date operational management. On top of that, trawler, drifter, and inshore shipowners were marked by a strong individualistic mentality. These were the challenging findings of the committee established to enquire into the “Reorganization of the Sea Fisheries” in 1950.9 In 1947, LEI Director Hildebrandt, also a member of the committee, had reached the same conclusions concerning the inshore fishermen in his report on the situation of the Dutch fishing industry.10 Moreover, both the Committee and the 1947 LEI report concluded that this situation had long since been apparent and had now become structural. In relation to overfishing, the export dependent Dutch fishing industry had lost its most important foreign markets after the First World War. Germany, the largest herring export market, was impoverished, but had also started to rebuild its own fishing fleet. Belgium also protected its own small-scale inshore fishery

8 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij; Bulletin Statistique. 9 The so-called “Tinbergen Committee”. 10 Hildebrandt, Onderzoek, 6–7, chapter 1.1.

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Map 3.1: Fishing ports, markets and motorways in The Netherlands, 2020. Note: Dutch fishing ports and their registration letters: ARM: Arnemuiden, BR: Breskens, BRU: Bruinisse, EH: Enkhuizen, GO: Goedereede, HA: Harlingen, HD: Den Helder, HK: Harderwijk, KG: Kortgene, KW: Katwijk, LO: Lauwersoog, OD: Ouddorp, SCH: Scheveningen, SL: Stellendam, ST: Stavoren, TH: Tholen, TM: Termunten, TS: Terschelling, TX: Texel, UK: Urk, UQ: Usquert (Noordpolderzijl), VD: Volendam, VLI: Vlissingen, WL: Westdongeradeel (Wierum/ Paesens/Moddergat), WON: Wonseradeeel (Makkum), WR: Wieringen, YE: Yerseke, YM: IJmuiden, ZK: Zoutkamp, ZZ: Zierikzee.

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by imposing a ban on Dutch fresh fish, while starting to build up its own modern distant water fleet. The Dutch fishing industry was not able to deal with this, either on its own or through government support, which was inadequate during the years of the Great Depression.11 In light of this, and given the fact that about half of the IJmuiden trawler fleet and 40 percent of the motor and steam drifter fleet had been lost in the Second World War,12 it is surprising that the performance of the Dutch fleet had improved at all in the previous four decades. However, it should be borne in mind that in 1913 practically the entire inshore fleet and more than two-thirds of herring drift netters were sailing vessels.

Early Awareness: The Tinbergen Report The arrest of growth in both the inshore and distant water fisheries coincided with the stagnation of the Dutch economy from 1929 until 1949.13 The aim of post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands was to realize a better life for all, better than it had been, for almost everyone, after many years of economic crisis and occupation. Like elsewhere in Europe, fishermen, policymakers, politicians and academics focused on the improvement of operating results and the standard of living. In this climate, the Minister of Agriculture, Fishery and Food Supply, Sicco Mansholt, set up a committee tasked with submitting concrete proposals for “putting the fishing industry on a healthy basis.”14 His social democratic fellow party member and brilliant economist, Jan Tinbergen, was appointed chair of this “Committee Reorganization Sea Fisheries,” which became known as the Tinbergen Committee.15 Despite the focus on growth, the Committee was fully conscious of the risks of overfishing and the decline of productivity of fishing grounds in the North Sea,16 especially with regard to cod, haddock, and other demersal species. The Committee pleaded for the reintroduction of measures agreed upon by the London

11 Hildebrandt, Onderzoek, 19. 12 Hildebrandt, Onderzoek, 12–14. 13 Van Zanden, Een klein land, 148–151. 14 By an Order of September 21, 1950. 15 In 1945, Prof. dr. Tinbergen was founder and first director of CPB (Central Plan Bureau), the main independent advising body in economic affairs of the national government. In 1969 he was, together with Ragnar Frisch, the winner of the first Nobel Prize in Economic Science. 16 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, 7–12.

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Convention (1937) and the Size Limits of Fish in 1937.17 In 1940, after the occupation of the Netherlands, these restrictions were cancelled. The British government initiated a new convention on this theme in 1946. Whereas the 1937 convention had agreed on a minimum trawl net mesh size of 7 centimeters, now eight was advocated. In The Netherlands, strong opposition to the 8-cm limit was pursued by the inshore fishermen. Their representative in the Tinbergen Committee, former skipper-owner and chairman of the Dutch Fishermen’s Association, Riekelt Brands, took up a minority opinion.18 He pleaded for 7 centimetres, “maybe eight in a later stage, but not now.”19 This is probably the first time that the “skipper-owners reflex” in overfishing matters was heard in a formal report. For many decades from that time onwards this reflex would contain three elements: – the proposed measures are ineffective; – overfishing is mainly caused by others (other fishing methods, foreign fishermen); – the proposed measures will cause economic disaster, and inshore fishermen cannot bear the burden. It is true that the economic position of the inshore fishery was very critical around 1951, despite the short boom just after the war. But the same arguments were used in times of extreme prosperity as in the 1970s. Anyway, Brands stood alone in this matter. The Tinbergen Committee showed a modern approach in supporting a basic form of fishery management. At the same time, however, it argued strongly in favor of the rapid modernization of the inshore and herring fisheries. For the committee members, being children of their time, the proven overfishing of demersal species in the North Sea was no reason to rethink the concept of intensive mechanized fishery. On the contrary, it was the main argument for developing an intensive fishery elsewhere; that is, a distant water trawling sector after the German model, state supported by investment loans for modern vessels and freezing plants, market protection, and, moreover, by a further development of the fishmeal industry.20 But the main reason why the Tinbergen Report would be remembered for many years was the conclusion that, for making the Dutch fishing industry sound and internationally competitive

17 Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Iceland, the Irish Free State, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden agreed on a minimum mesh size and minimum sizes for specific species caught in the North Sea. 18 Riekelt Brands was formerly skipper-owner and chairman of the Associaton (Nederlandse Vissersbond) from 1947 until his death in 1964. 19 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, 107, bijlage 2. 20 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, 81.

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again, an active national fishery policy was necessary. And secondly, the industry badly needed long-term loans. A public-private “fishery bank” would be the solution.21 Neither proposal would be realized.

The Mechanism Two decades later, both the structure and the scope of the Dutch fishing industry had changed drastically. The most fundamental change was in the market and occurred as a direct consequence of international developments and trends. The founding of the EEC on January 1, 1958 led to the opening of the Belgian, German, French and Italian markets in the early 1960s. For the first time since the First World War the export of fish and fish products to these countries did not suffer from tariff walls. At the same time, the focus on efficiency and the increase in production capacity, which had been at the core of Dutch post-war reconstruction policy, remained in full force in the 1960s. This was a powerful combination with regard to the inshore sector. Soon, most of the exported fresh sole and sole fillets went to France. Also, between 1960 and 1964, the so-called double beam trawl replaced the traditional otter trawl in the inshore fisheries. This was nothing less than a revolution. The development of the inshore sector in this period contrasted sharply with the course of events in the IJmuiden trawling industry and herring fishery.22 It clearly shows the mechanism behind the overfishing issue. During the 1960s, the number of inshore “cutters,” small side trawlers, replaced by beam trawlers, was stable (approximately 480), but the catch capacity in hp increased by 57 percent. In absolute terms, flatfish catches increased as well. However, in the five years between 1964 and 1969, the productivity per hp dropped by 32 percent. The gross revenue per hp dropped by 6.7%, but the costs did as well because of economies of scale. So, the result was a rise in added value per hp and a spectacular increase of income per crew member of 67 percent.23 The combination of open markets, effective new fishing gear, increased standard of living, and, last but not least, cheap oil, proved to be an explosive mix with regard to overfishing the North Sea flatfish stocks. This is not surprising. A period of boom in the fishing industry has opposite effects of what happens in almost all other industries. In an agricultural or

21 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, 83–87. 22 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, chapter 5. 23 Rapport van de Commissie Sanering Zeevisserij, 57–58.

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manufacturing boom, overproduction and falling market prices usually follow one another. In the fisheries, a few good years lead to bigger vessels, underproduction, and rising prices. This is demonstrated in Figure 3.2, which shows a simplified economic model in free market circumstances.

Figure 3.2: Economic model of a free market fishery.

Past the economic (1) and biological (2) optimum, catches will tend to drop. They are expected to drop faster than revenues, subject to specific circumstances per species, since fish prices tend to rise in case of shortage. This keeps the increase of fishing effort profitable beyond points (1) and (2). Even at point (3), chosen at random but before the moment that costs pass the revenue, it still seems attractive to the individual skipper-owner to invest in vessel, horse power, and fishing gear.24

The Watershed That is exactly what happened around 1970. Two decades after the alarming reports of Hildebrandt and Tinbergen, and not even ten years after the opening of the German, French, and Italian markets within the EEC, the position of the inshore fisheries had changed completely. The export of Dutch flat fish flourished. A new generation of young fishermen, born in the 1940s and early 1950s, was eager to take over. Banks scrambled with one another to finance new and

24 Rijneveld and De Wilde, Ekonomische aspekten, 7.

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technically sophisticated vessels. A spectacular and unprecedented fleet renewal occurred. Analogous to the Cold War arms race, this became known as “the horse power race.” On top of a relatively gradual modernization between 1964 and 1970, about 100 beam trawlers with an average engine power of 1,400 hp were ordered in the following two years.25 Catches and earnings stayed on the same level around 1970–1972. Only a few realized that the growth in income, which proved to be the main factor in the individual decision-making process as to whether to invest in a more powerful vessel or not, was based on an ever-larger effort in terms of kg catch per hp. Contemporaries in the fishing industry perceived the early 1970s as a watershed – as the beginning of a new era. The baby boomers who became skippers of a brand new vessel, being in their early twenties, belonged to the first generation of inshore fishermen who had not experienced poverty themselves, or in their communities. And yes, the Dutch inshore fishing fleet had never been so big, so modern, and so young. A positive work ethic, optimism, pride, and local rivalry were powerful drivers in this process. But it was not the beginning of a new era. Rather, it was the last stage of a centuries long period in which both fishermen and government were focused on greater exploitation of the sea, a period in which the individual freedom of the fisherman was unquestioned, both at sea and regarding his investment decisions. These years were also, what soon proved to be, the last stage of almost a quarter of a century of unprecedented prosperity in the Netherlands, with the period 1950–1973 generally described as “the golden years of Dutch economy.”26 However, it was not national policy and economy, but international trends and disruption that determined the development of the Dutch fishing industry. From the early 1950s onwards, awareness of the potential value of fishing grounds increasingly became a political issue, as did signaling overfishing. The final revision of maritime law resulting in the 200 miles EEZ in 1976 led to a shift in the world trade of fish and fish products. Attempts to formulate a beginning of a European fishery policy, which started with lengthy negotiations on Britain’s entry to the EEC, would have far-reaching consequences, as did the energy crisis of 1973. But who was aware of this? Perhaps the long-term impact of what happened internationally in the early 1970s was recognized by a few academics, but neither the industry nor politicians were aware that this was the real watershed. The reaction of the Dutch government on the increased flatfish catch

25 Rijneveld and De Wilde, Ekonomische aspekten, chapter 1. 26 Van Zanden, Een klein land, 183–211.

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capacity and the “First Oil Crisis” shows this clearly. The Cabinet, right wing until May 1973 and leftish for the next four years, tried to keep things “normal” as long as possible. Subsidies were its main instrument. The government’s answer to the oil crisis was a 30 million guilders compensation for the inshore sector in 1974 and the following year.27 This was an unprecedented amount, more than ten times that expended on occasional support during the 1960s.28 However, this policy was a dead end. In 1975, the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Fons van der Stee, had to back down. Decreasing flat fish catches, ever rising costs, and falling fish prices brought many skipper-owners into financial heavy weather. Something drastic had to happen. A fund of 38 million guilders was established for restructuring the flatfish fleet in the next five years. Although it was clear that the bigger and more powerful vessels were relatively less productive, 138 older and smaller vessels were taken out of the fleet in the “first restructuring scheme” of 1975–1976. At the same time, quotas for sole and plaice were introduced. In 1971, NEAFC had imposed a quota for North Sea herring, and now the Dutch government applied this instrument to the inshore fisheries.29 The Q-word became the symbol of the real watershed. Without exception, fishermen were not able to deal with this restriction of their freedom. They tried to challenge it, repeating the key arguments of the late fisheries leader Brands in every possible way.30 Meanwhile they kept on fishing as if nothing had changed. On the other hand, the government had no idea how to enforce the new regulations. Catch control proved to be much more complicated in practice than on paper.

Leaving the North Sea In the same period, the distant water sector developed in a completely different way. Both government and trawler owners failed to build up a distant water fishery in the true sense of the word, as the Tinbergen Committee had recommended in 1952. Twelve years later, a similar committee, chaired by Arend 27 Tienstra, “Vijfentwintig jaar overheidsbeleid,” 30. In 1974, 30m guilders had a purchasing power of approximately 30m euros in 2018. 28 Earlier subsidies were provided in order to stimulate the modernization of the fleet, develop new markets, and co-finance experimental trips to distant waters. 29 After the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confirmed the legality of the quota scheme, it came into effect by July 14, 1976. 30 See section 2.1 above.

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Diepenhorst, an economist, gave the same advice.31 But repeated subsidized experiments in North Atlantic waters in the 1950s and 1960s were too small in scale to have a chance to proof anything other than costing a lot of money to both parties. The IJmuiden trawler owners also faced a crew problem. There was little enthusiasm among Dutch fishermen for long trips to the harsh environments of the Norwegian or Barents Sea. There was plenty of alternative employment in the fast developing industry on shore. So, the overfished North Sea stayed the most important trawling area for round and flatfish. Inevitably, this had to come to an end. In 1980, only two vessels, both stern freezer trawlers, were still active under YM registration.32 Apart from incidental good years, the herring and trawler sectors operated against an economic headwind during these three decades.33 This had also been the case during the interwar years. So, for more than half of the twentieth century, the distant water industry was on, and sometimes over, the edge of structural loss. This is usually seen as the main reason why the modernization of the herring sector was a slow process. It was not until 1969 that the last drift netter was taken out of service. A decade later only seven out of the 63 herring companies based in Katwijk and Scheveningen that owned ships in 1950 were still in existence. In Vlaardingen, it was just one. Together they deployed 22 freezer trawlers, catching only seven percent less than the 260 vessels had taken in 1950. However, by then, all of the catch, mainly herring, mackerel, and some round and flatfish, came from the North Sea, whereas in 1980 the equivalent figure was just one percent.34 What had happened? Until the late 1960s, the herring sector invested gradually in new vessels, but its scope remained the same. It was a North Sea based industry, serving its main markets for generations. Change was forced from the outside. In the mid-1960s, the herring worm, a notorious parasite (Anisakis simplex), caused a few consumers to end up in hospital. This was hyped by the media, leading to the collapse of the traditional inland herring seasons in 1966 and 1967.35 In 1968, the Ministry of Public Health ordered that fresh or slightly salted herring had to be frozen on board directly after catch to minus 20 degrees Celsius. This meant the end of the conventional drifters and side trawlers, which had suffered a dramatic fall in herring catches since 1964. Maybe for the first time all nations involved accepted overfishing as the main cause. The Dutch,

31 This was the so-called “Diepenhorst Committee.” Its final report, Rapport van de Commissie Ontwikkeling Zeevisserij, was published in 1964. 32 Pronk, De pakkentrekkers, 79. 33 De Jager, De grote zeevisserij, 8. 34 De Jager, De grote zeevisserij, 9. 35 Loomeijer, “In gesprek met Vlaardings laatste haringreder,” 46.

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historically good for eight percent of the yearly North Sea herring catch,36 blamed the Danes and Norwegians for that, because of their massive herring catches for fishmeal in the previous 20 years. This led to the 1971 herring quotas, followed by stricter, but hardly enforced, measures in following years. Finally, in 1977, a total ban on the herring fisheries in the North Sea, Celtic Sea, and the herring grounds West of the Hebrides was proclaimed.37

A Toothless Tiger Although, at first sight, the development of the distant water sector was more gradual and less sensational than what happened in the inshore fisheries in the early and mid-1970s, the outcome was even more dramatic. The IJmuiden trawl fishery came to an end after about 90 years. The same happened with the North Sea herring sector. But at the same time nothing less than a revolution took place in the handful of surviving companies. They did what the Tinbergen and Diepenhorst committees had advocated earlier; they left the overfished North Sea and developed a real distant water fishery with new markets in a surprisingly short time. Not in Icelandic, Russian or Norwegian waters, because of the new 200 miles zone. And not on the depleted Grand Banks, but partly in the European Atlantic and increasingly in North African waters as well. Mackerel, horse mackerel, blue whiting, and sardinella, in a later stage, became the new pelagic target species. West Africa, and Nigeria in particular became the new market. However, around 1980, a quota for (horse)mackerel was established. While negotiations to establish a Common Fishery Policy went on in Brussels and Strasbourg for some years, the individual member states had agreed to maintain the quota. A simple system was set up. Skippers had to fill in a fish logbook, noting where, when, and how much of each species was caught. Civil servants inspected the catch at random when brought into a Dutch auction. On paper this system looked fine. But what could the inspectors do when trawler skippers reported that 80 percent of the 500 tons mackerel on board was bought from foreign trawlers when klondyking on the Irish West coast, thus saving their own quota? And what could they do when inshore skippers simply ignored the inspection and kept on fishing until Christmas, despite having used their sole or plaice quota by the end of June? Trawler companies and inshore

36 De Jager, De grote zeevisserij, 9. 37 De Jager, De grote zeevisserij, 54–55.

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skipper-owners were brought to court, but that did not put them off. They preferred to pay the relatively low fines, instead of adapting to a new formal regime that they regarded unfair, and which was clearly not to their advantage in the short term. That authorities and politicians turned a blind eye to this practice fitted with the Dutch liberal climate of the 1970s and early 1980s. Also, in the first instance, public opinion was with the fishermen and not with the state, which proved to be a toothless tiger. The situation changed when, after a few poor years in the mid-1970s, good catches and high fish prices led to another round in the inshore fisheries horsepower race. In 1979 and 1980, no less than 65 vessels of a new generation with a total capacity of 85,000 hp were ordered. An interesting moral and political aspect is that this massive investment was stimulated by a 15 percent investment premium by the same government that tried to restrict the catch capacity.38 At the same time, the effects of the “Second Oil Crisis” of 1979 were being felt. With oil prices rising to an unprecedented level in 1981, the history of the mid-1970s repeated itself, forcing skipper-owners, driven as ever by short-term considerations, to catch as much as possible in order to avoid bankruptcy. What happened next can be summarized as follows39: – in 1980 the export volume broke through the one-billion-guilder mark for the first time; – catch capacity and catch volume peaked in the next few years; – fishermen and fish auctions developed an intricate double bookkeeping system, thus circumventing the quotas; – from 1984 onwards, the Dutch government faced increasing pressure from Brussels to review its inadequate control system; – the image of the fishermen turned from “hard working heroes of the sea” into “the killers of the sea.” The fishing industry increasingly lost public support. By the end of 1986, the open secret of the large-scale fishing fraud could not be ignored any longer. The media reported the active involvement of the Ministry with fraudulent fishermen and auction directors, and a conscious obstruction of the implementation of EU rules. In June 1987, a parliamentary committee of inquiry confirmed this in outline, speaking about the “culpable knowledge” of the

38 The so-called “WIR-premium,” a state program to stimulate investment in capital goods from 1978 to 1988. 39 See Loomeijer, “Dutch Beam Trawl Industry,” 178–186.

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Ministry.40 Just 11 days later, the Christian Democratic Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Gerrit Braks, issued a set of corrective measures. For the first time since the introduction of catch limiting measures in the 1970s, it seemed that a sense of urgency came over the fisheries policy of the Dutch government. However, soon it became clear that the tiger only had milk teeth. After three years, Parliament concluded that Braks’ control program had failed, which led to his resignation in September 1990.

Instruments and Challenges This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ministry and industry entered into discussion, chaired by former Prime Minister, Barend Biesheuvel.41 The aim was to devise a control system that would be supported by both The Hague/ Brussels and the industry. Co-management and self-control became the key elements, together with a program to limit the catch capacity, in which the individually owned and transferable catch licenses, which were held by socalled producer groups, were managed by a board of fishermen. In 1993, this system became operational.42 Now the inshore sector entered a new phase. After a period of acclimatization and fine tuning, the co-management model turned out to be workable for both sides. It became the basis on which the Dutch government tried to manage the industry’s catching effort within the framework of the CFP. Of the additional instruments, most of which had already existed for a long time, some were more successful, and others less so. Fishing gear and horsepower regulation was introduced in 1987.43 That worked well. However, the closure of an extensive area of the German Bight (40,000 km2) for the more powerful beamers (300 hp plus), in order to protect young plaice, the so-called “plaice box,” has not yet had any measurable effect. On the contrary, in the following decade, the plaice stock in the

40 Under pressure from Brussels, the Eversdijk Committee (after chairman Huib Eversdijk, Christian Democratic MP) was established on December 1, 1986. On June 4, 1987, its report was presented to Parliament. 41 Biesheuvel, a Christian Democrat, was MP in the Dutch Parliament (1956–1963, 1967–1971), MEP in the European Parliament (1961–1963), Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries (1963–1967), and Prime Minister (1971–1973). 42 Loomeijer, “Dutch Beam Trawl Industry,” 185. 43 The maximum beam trawl length was 12 meters, with a 2,000 horse power limit for beam trawlers.

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Southern North Sea halved. This fuelled the old distrust of fishermen towards the biologists, who had to admit that they could not explain what was going on.44 In the twenty-first century, the Dutch fishing industry has landed in what can be seen as a new reality. A catch limiting regime within the CFP, in conjunction with marine stewardship, has become a fact of life for both the inshore and distant water sectors. In the latter, three family owned companies with a large number of subsidiaries and international joint ventures employ about 10,000 people worldwide.45 Only a small minority is Dutch. Fish plans fit in the CFP or in bilateral agreements between the EU and countries like Morocco, Mauritania, Norway and the Faroe Islands (see Map 3.2). The inshore fishery has lost much of its capacity. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of bigger beam trawlers decreased by more than 50 percent. The monopoly of the beam trawl was challenged by repeated high oil prices, political pressure on CO2 emissions, and a ban on discards. An even more fundamental issue developed in the form of alternative uses of the fishing grounds. Increasing traffic in the shipping lanes, closed areas within the framework of Natura 2000, and, above all, the increasing number of wind parks, have limited the sea space available for fishing. As in the 1950s and 1970s, despite a much higher level of education, the individualistic mentality of the inshore fishermen still prevents them from being a united and professional partner in discussions with the ENGOs, the offshore energy sector, and the different government departments dealing with these issues.

Conclusions In 2020, apart from specific cases, overfishing is not a main issue anymore for the Dutch distant water and inshore sectors. There was almost a century between pointing out the potential depletion of species and controlling the mechanism of overfishing. The Dutch contribution to over exploiting the North Sea was relatively minor until the 1960s, due to the slow development of both distant water and inshore fisheries after the First World War. Change set in during the 1960s, when open markets in combination with the effectiveness of the double beam trawl and a consistently low oil price led to growing fishing pressure on plaice and sole. Until then, government, fishermen, and marine biologists

44 Posthumes and Rijnsdorp, Schol in de Noordzee, 202–208. 45 Cornelis Vrolijk in IJmuiden from 1880; W. van der Zwan & Sons in Scheveningen from 1888; Parlevliet & van der Plas in Katwijk (P&P) from 1949.

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Map 3.2: The Netherlands, 1950–2020: from North Sea fishing nation to global player.

thought and acted from the same state of mind, aiming for rising production and greater efficiency. The notion that the North Sea had long since been overfished was a reason to plead for an intensified fishery elsewhere. External factors, the 1973 oil crisis in the first place, forced government and industry to change course. However, neither were able to deal with this, and therefore it

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was 20 years before the increase in the catch capacity of the flatfish fisheries came to a halt. The herring and demersal trawling sectors were not able to find a way out of the headwind they had faced since the 1920s. In the 1970s, both came to an end, except for a handful of herring companies in Scheveningen and Katwijk, which went over to pelagic trawling on mackerel, left the North Sea, and found new markets. As in so many countries, the 1970s proved to be a watershed in the development of the Dutch fishing industry. However, where most European distant water fisheries did not survive the fundamental changes of that decade, in The Netherlands they led to concentration, increase in scale, and the take-off of a real deep-sea fishery. This was something that, despite a few half-baked attempts, had never succeeded before.

Bibliography Bulletin Statistique du Pêche Maritimes des Pays du Nord de l’Europe. Davidse, W. P., et al. Ontwikkeling in de kleine zeevisserij in Nederland. Den Haag: LandbouwEconomisch Instituut, Mededelingen en Overdrukken No. 97, 1973. De Jager, L. J. De grote zeevisserij in Nederland, ontwikkeling en perspectieven. Den Haag: Landbouw-Economisch Instituut, afdeling visserij en bosbouw No. 5, 1982. Hildebrandt, A. G. U. Onderzoek naar de toestand van de Nederlandse zeevisserij. Den Haag: Landbouw-Economisch Instituut Rapport No. 80, September 1947. Hildebrandt, A. G. U. “Het economisch onderzoek in de visserij.” In Tien jaren LandbouwEconomisch Instituut: Opbouw van het economisch onderzoek in landbouw, tuinbouw en visserij, edited by G. Minderhoud et al. Assen: Van Gorcum & Co, 1950. Hoogendijk, A. De grootvisscherij op de Noordzee. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1894: Voorbericht VI. Loomeijer, Frits R. “In gesprek met Vlaardings laatste haringreder.” Netwerk: Tijdschrift van de Vereniging Vrienden van het Visserijmuseum 4 (1993). Loomeijer, Frits R. “The Dutch Beam Trawl Industry.” In Technological Change in the North Atlantic Fisheries, edited by Poul Holm and David J. Starkey, 169–186. Esbjerg, 1999. Posthumes, Roelke, and Adriaan Rijnsdorp. Schol in de Noordzee, een biografie van de platvis en de Nederlandse visserij. Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2016. Pronk, Bram. De pakkentrekkers van de lange deining, 30 jaar geschiedenis van de Nederlandse hektrawlervisserij. Den Haag: Uitgeverij Ton Borghouts, 1991. Rapport van de commissie sanering zeevisserij, Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Directie van de visserijen No. 42 (Den Haag, Ministerie van Landbouw, Visserij en Voedselvoorziening, 1952). Rijneveld R., and J. W. de Wilde. Ekonomische aspekten van overbevissing en quotering voor de Nederlandse kottervisserij. Den Haag: Landbouw-Economisch Instituut, Mededelingen en Overdrukken No. 113, 1974.

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Tienstra, Th. J., et al. “Vijfentwintig jaar overheidsbeleid ten aanzien van de visserij.” In Het Visserijschap, speerpunt voor de visserij, uitgave ter gelegenheid van het 25-jarig jubileum. Haarlem: De Boer Maritiem, 1980. Van Zanden, Jan Luiten. Een klein land in de 20e eeuw: Economische geschiedenis van Nederland 1914–1995. Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1997.

Robb Robinson

4 Early Lessons on Overfishing from the British Isles By the early twentieth century the United Kingdom was not only the leading colonial, mercantile, and maritime power, but it also possessed the world’s largest and most sophisticated fishing industry. This combination of advantageous circumstances meant that its government and fish trade were better placed than those of many other states to influence fish catching activities on the high seas, in so-called international waters. This chapter examines the ways in which, over time, but particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British State and its fishing interests reacted, responded, and formulated their approaches to key fishery issues, most notably those relating to overfishing. The late nineteenth-century fisheries of the British Isles were both extensive and complex. At the opening of the twentieth century, there were still more than 100,000 fishermen working from one or other of the hundreds of fishing stations, fishing communities of every shape and size, unevenly dispersed around all coasts of this North Atlantic archipelago.1 The rich waters these fishermen exploited were home to an immense variety of fish, which were caught with a somewhat confusing array of catching equipment and craft. The exploitation of maritime resources was indeed an ancient activity: its origins, here, as in many other places, can be traced back to the hunter-gatherer epoch, but sea fishing from the British Isles had grown rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Though what might be thought of as smaller, traditional, or older, and often rural, fishing stations or villages had played a part in this expansive phase until at least the 1880s, the leading sectors of the British Isles fish trade were increasingly dominated by two well-capitalized and in many ways very modern sectors: the trawl and herring fisheries. The former concentrated on taking white fish such as the cod, haddock, and related species, more often than not to be sold fresh on the inland domestic market. In contrast, many of the herring landed were destined to be salted and packed in barrels for consumption in central and eastern Europe, although a significant number were instead lightly smoked and sold as kippers and bloaters for the British market.2 The rapid rise in landings by the British fishing industry from the middle of the nineteenth century was due in no small part to the construction of a multitude

1 Robinson, Fishermen, 11. 2 Robinson, Fishermen, 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-005

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of separate railway lines across the country: the coming together of these often individual initiatives had created the outline of a national railway network even before the end of the 1840s. Though the carriage of fish by rail was initially fraught with a variety of logistical and accountancy problems, these were soon overcome and the potential opportunities for the conveyance of perishable commodities such as fish were soon grasped. Railways offered relatively cheap, fast, and reliable transport from coastal fishing stations to the rapidly industrializing heartlands of Britain. In short, railway transport made fresh fish an article of mass consumption inland – an inexpensive source of much-needed protein – and though all branches of the white fish trade benefited, it was the offshore trawling trade, with its potential for making very large catches of relatively cheap species, that benefited the most.3 Similarly, though slightly later in the century, the spread of railways across central and eastern Europe opened up massive new markets serviced by those involved in the catching and processing of herring. Prior to the railway era, transportation problems had always placed certain constraints on the expansion of the fisheries of the British Isles and therefore on the levels of exploitation of adjacent marine resources. Being a perishable commodity, fish had been ill-suited for long distance conveyance in the pre-railway era without some form of processing or preserving, most notably by means of smoking, salting, air-drying or by a combination of two or three of these methods. Whilst it had long been possible to transport some fresh fish to inland markets through the use of fast carriages and pannier pony trains, or even to bring large fish such as live cod from distant waters to the vicinity of ports such as London, in specially constructed wells on ships, the costs restricted this trade to the tables of very wealthy consumers. Such practical problems had for centuries considerably constrained the level of exploitation of the sea fisheries. Though recent scholarship has highlighted and broadened public understanding of the scope and scale of the European fisheries in earlier epochs,4 it is still probably fair to say that until the railway era and the rise of the trawling trade, many of the major sea fish stocks off the coasts of north-west Europe were still relatively healthy and abundant, certainly if judged from the rapid expansion of landings from grounds around Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the fisheries had a long history of attracting sporadic and sometimes fitful legislative interference from the State, occasionally driven by complaints of overfishing.

3 Robinson, Trawling, 29–33. 4 Roberts, Unnatural History, 17–23

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Trawling had been, prior to nineteenth century, a much more marginal way of taking white fish. Hooks and lines had been much more commonplace, yet trawling had often been considered a controversial activity, exciting the wrath of many other fishermen who considered it particularly undiscriminating, taking large and small fish alike especially when pursued on inshore grounds. Such concerns about the activities of trawlers were almost certainly behind the passage of an Act in 1715 which prohibited the landing of various species of young fish: these included codling of less than 12 inches, turbot not exceeding 16 inches, and soles still under eight inches in length.5 These restrictions, and others like them, remained on the statute books as late as the 1860s, albeit largely unenforced.6 Though there were evidently exceptions, the relatively low takes of many species of white fish around the British Isles before the nineteenth century probably had at most a marginal impact on the health of their stocks. However, this did little to assuage the occurrence of periodic panics. In part this was probably because, as Michell suggested, the pre-industrial experiences of managing fish ponds probably encouraged the view that people’s extractive activities had to be related to finite levels of stock – or numbers of fish considerably smaller than those found in the sea.7 Whilst it was difficult to gain an accurate impression of the impact of human activity on white fish stocks in British waters in the pre-railway era, there were other related activities where this was more evident. It had been apparent for centuries, for example, that shellfish beds could be over-exploited, not least, for example, the once prolific and popular oyster fisheries. The Crown had a long history of granting charters aimed at restricting or overseeing the exploitation of various such beds around the coasts.8 Attempts to control the level of fisheries exploitation were just one of the reasons why the State had occasionally sought to intervene in catching activities around the British Isles in earlier centuries. In the mercantilist era, for example, the British viewed the Dutch cured herring industry with envy, given that much of the fish the latter relied upon were taken off the east coasts of Britain. Many early attempts encouraged by the State to emulate the quality of Dutch curing techniques met with failure.9

5 I Geo I Cap. XVIII. 6 Robinson, “Evolution of Some Key Elements,” 131. 7 Michell, “Evolution of North Sea Fisheries,” 92. 8 BPP, 1866, XVII-XVIII, Royal Commission on the Sea Fisheries, Minutes of Evidence, qq. 5007–5008, 6560–6566. 9 Robinson, “Fisheries of Northwest Europe,” 142–144.

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But there were other, less immediately commercial, reasons why the British state was interested in nurturing, or at least protecting, the British fisheries. Apart from a potential source of wealth, the fisheries were also perceived to be a nursery for seamen, an important reservoir of skilled labour, particularly for the Royal Navy in times of war. They were therefore sometimes perceived as worthy of support and encouragement by the State, and even Adam Smith, that arch opponent of providing subsidies for the fishing and whaling trades, conceded that the State might be justified in providing support.10 Another reason why the fisheries were sometimes publicly supported – in some cases by individual towns and at other times by the State, particularly in the eighteenth century – was because they seemed to offer a means of alleviating periodic food shortages, especially in rapidly expanding urban centres. Bounties were thus sometimes provided to encourage the landing and subsequent carriage of fish to inland towns.11 But it is fair to say that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, State interference in fishery operations off the British Isles was somewhat fitful and often, though not always, in response to short-term issues. But the nature of the legislation generated by such concerns lacked cohesion and the absence of an overall strategy was all too evident. Whilst many subsidies, or bounties as they were called, were removed by the so-called “liberal Tory” administration under Lord Liverpool in the 1820s, the nature of fisheries legislation remained somewhat obscure and unclear. In short, at the dawn of the railway age, existing fisheries legislation was often ancient, sometimes contradictory or at least confusing and all too often unenforced. Though there is some evidence to suggest that the Bounty system, overseen by the Edinburgh-based Fishery Board and introduced as late as 1808 to assure the quality of cured herring, had helped encourage the expansion of this branch of the fish export trade,12 it is fair to say that much of the work of the State in the direction of stimulating fisheries output or protecting stocks had hitherto made at best no more than a marginal impact.

Change in Marketing Environment Initially, the radical transformation of transportation proved especially favorable for the trawling trade, which responded by expanding rapidly. Trawling was initially an inshore activity with its roots stretching back to at least the

10 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 345–348. 11 Clarke, “Location and Development,” 21–22. 12 Gray, Fishing Industry of Scotland, 50–53; Coull, Sea Fisheries, 104–105.

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fourteenth century, but in the 1700s it underwent a revolutionary transition with the development of a deep-sea version that utilized offshore sailing vessels known as smacks, which initially worked out of Devon and the Thames Approaches and then in other waters. Between 1830 and 1860, the practice spread rapidly from its original strongholds and was shortly to be found off many English coasts. However, after the railways were constructed, ports capable of exploiting the North Sea fishing grounds soon proved to be the foci for the investment in increasing trawling capacity, and by the mid-1860s more than 1,000 sailing smacks were on the UK register.13 Trawling was a controversial activity and old animosities aroused by this method of taking fish were revived as trawlers multiplied in number. Traditional fishermen led the complaints, protesting that trawl nets were not only denuding the grounds, but also claiming that their hooks, lines, and in some cases drift nets were being wrecked by smacks dragging their cumbersome trawl nets over or through them. As trawlermen began to encroach on more and more grounds along the north-east coast of England that had formerly been the preserve of line fishermen, such protests intensified. The situation was aggravated in the early 1860s by a temporary downturn in some recently buoyant northern inland fish markets, occasioned by the Lancashire cotton famine, which, in turn, was precipitated by the United States Civil War. In late 1862, anti-trawling agitation came to a head: traditional line fishermen held meetings to protest against the practice, particularly in ports along the north-east coast of England, MPs were lobbied and Parliament petitioned. Their activities provoked an intense reaction amongst the trawling interests, who deployed much the same tactics.14 Feelings ran high on both sides, with traditional line fishermen claiming that fish stocks were decreasing and that trawling destroyed fish spawn and nurseries, while the trawlermen claimed landings were continuing to increase. Lord Palmerston’s Liberal Government finally responded by convening a Royal Commission charged with establishing what was actually happening to fish supplies, and whether trawling was in fact wasteful in terms of the destruction of spawn and young fish. The three commissioners appointed to this task were very much in the vein of the rising economic and scientific orthodoxies of their day. James Caird was a reputable agricultural writer, a recognized supporter of free trade and the Anti-Corn Law League in the 1840s; he had urged the modernization of British agriculture in order to take full advantage of changing market opportunities.15 George Shaw

13 Robinson, Trawling, 49. 14 See for example, Whitby Gazette, December 13, 1862, Scarborough Gazette, January 15, 1863, Newcastle Courant, March 27, 1863 and Hull Advertiser, April 1, 1863. 15 Caird, English Agriculture in 1850–1, ix–x.

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Lefevre, who joined the other commissioners a couple of months later, was the son of John Shaw Lefevre, who had argued in the 1840s for the abandonment of “objectionable” bounties for herring curing overseen by the Scottish-based fishery board.16 The final, and arguably most influential, commissioner was Thomas Henry Huxley. Regarded as one of the most significant scientific intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century, and a founding father of the discipline of Biology, he was to sit on at least ten Royal Commissions. Huxley is particularly associated today with his combative defence of the Origin of Species, which earned him the soubriquet of “Darwin’s Bulldog.” The investigations of the commissioners were certainly wide-ranging in geographical terms. They visited no fewer than 150 fishing centres on every coast of the British Isles in addition to holding meetings at Billingsgate and in Westminster: no less than 62,000 questions and answers were recorded in the Minutes of Evidence.17 Their enquiries were hampered by a lack of reliable data. Few runs of statistical information were available and what was unearthed was limited and unrepresentative. Much of the evidence they collected was subjective and qualitative rather than quantitative: line fishermen claiming relatively consistently when questioned that catches were falling and that trawling destroyed spawn, whereas trawlermen usually claimed their activities had no impact on stocks. The commissioners were also hamstrung by a dearth of earlier research. The discipline of marine biology was at an embryonic stage, with little known about the life cycles of sea fish other than that many species seemed to produce enormous quantities of eggs. Whilst empirical experience suggested that natural factors might affect stock size, it was much more difficult to assess the impact of human catching activities. Huxley was certainly in the vanguard of those who thought that many open sea fish species were so prolific, and the waters in which they swam were so extensive that the quantities taken by fishermen were extremely unlikely to have much impact on the viability of stocks.18 The evidence the commissioners collected as they travelled around the British Isles made it clear that almost all main kinds of offshore fishing activities had increased markedly over the last couple of decades. Far more fishing vessels and crews were sailing out to take fish than had been the case in the pre-railway era. The increased numbers of fishermen, and the greater range of some of the more modern trawl fishing vessels, certainly seemed to have increased competition on some grounds that hitherto had been the haunt only of traditional line fishermen

16 BPP, 1849, LIX, Report to the Treasury by J.G. Shaw-Lefevre on the Fishery Board, 185–186. 17 Ramster, “Fisheries Research,” 179. 18 Barback, Political Economy, 18–19.

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and specific fishing communities. But the seas had never been appropriated, traditional individual land-based property rights did not exist, the seabed was not divided up into privately owned fields as in a village, and it was in many respects a common: its fish stocks were wild, and it was the process of capture that turned such common resources into private property. Certainly, in the nineteenth century, the oceans, particularly outside of what passed for territorial waters, were regarded as open waters, and no nation, individual or company could claim rights over them. In any case, fish were a fugitive resource, and the available evidence seemed to suggest that they migrated over considerable distances, journeys that would have taken little account of any human property divisions had they existed. The period when the Royal Commissioners were taking their evidence has sometimes been described as the high-water mark of laissez faire. Previous decades had seen a determined drive amongst influential and well-connected groups in British society to remove restrictions that might unnecessarily check the workings of the free market and attempts to consolidate or extend such restrictions seemed most unlikely in the then prevalent political climate to elicit a sympathetic hearing from those in power. Furthermore, across the North Sea, in 1857, the government in The Netherlands had already taken steps to remove the centuries old legislation that had regulated their long-declining fisheries.19 It was clear that over the previous 20 years trawling had proved an effective means of satisfying the nation’s increasing demand for cheap nutritious food and given that the prevailing biological theories suggested that the fisheries were inexhaustible, the commissioners took the view that restrictions were not only irrelevant but harmful to the free workings of market forces. But what about the limits of national jurisdiction? The Royal Commission report, published in 1868, also found that there was no certainty regarding the actual sea area over which a state could claim sovereignty. Definitions of territorial waters and fishery limits were not consistent, lacked clear definition, were sometimes “extremely defective” and fraught with legal ambiguity.20 The Royal Commission Report’s solution to these and other shortcomings involved the application of a “free trade” approach to superintending the nation’s fisheries. It recommended that, although limited safeguards should be retained for some inshore fisheries, all acts of Parliament intended to restrict or regulate fisheries in the open sea should be removed, thus allowing an unrestricted and untrammelled freedom to those seeking to exploit the fisheries. As in other economic areas, they also recommended the removal of prohibitions on foreign landings of

19 Bruijn, “Dutch Fisheries,” 115. 20 BPP, 1866, XVII-XVIII, Report of the Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries, 62.

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fish at British ports and encouraged the government to seek reciprocal arrangements for British fishermen abroad. Described by the twentieth-century economist Ronald Barback as the “true and final apotheosis of classical laissez faire,”21 the Report’s writers adhered to the theory that the fisheries were inexhaustible. Moreover, bolstered by their belief in the benefits of free trade, they advocated the freedom to fish anywhere on the high seas and in any manner, curtailed only by codes of practice intended to maintain order and prevent accidental damage. Their recommendations on these points were largely accepted by the Government of the day and incorporated into the 1868 Sea Fisheries Act, along with legislation intended to improve policing, which included the registration and numbering of fishing vessels.22 But one key point not adopted by the Government was the Report’s recommendation that the effective collection of fishery statistics on landings and the like be commenced, so that hard data would be available in the future to “prevent the constant recurrence of panics to which the fishery interest had hitherto been subjected.”23 This lack of reliable statistical evidence had meant that the commissioners had been unable to provide a realistic and reliably quantitative answer to the question of whether the increased effort of the previous 20 or so years, in terms of the growing deployment of vessels, crews, and fishing gear, had resulted in a proportionate increase in the landings of fish. In other words, whether the marginal return on fish landed for each additional unit of capital and labour employed was constant, increasing or decreasing. Also, unsurprisingly, no reliable figures were available concerning the amount of fish being taken on different grounds. Thus their attempt to determine the effects of the expansion of fishing effort over the previous two decades was further complicated by the fact that during this period new fishing grounds across the North Sea had been explored and opened up, while fish that had been unsaleable in the pre-railway era because of its low value was now being landed. After the removal of the old restrictions, the fishing industry continued to expand at a rapid rate. By 1868, well over 1,000 trawling smacks were registered at the three ports of Grimsby, Hull, and Scarborough, whilst many hundreds more fished out of other North Sea fishing stations.24 Though sail was the main means of motive power, steam began to be introduced into the business of trawling, initially through the use of converted steam tugs in the late 1870s, followed by purpose-built steam screw trawlers during the 1880s.

21 22 23 24

Barback, Political Economy, 18–19. 18 & 19 Vict., Cap. 9. BPP, 1866, XVII-XVIII, Report of the Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries, cvi. Robinson, Trawling, 53.

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British fishermen were not alone in increasing activity in adjacent waters. By the 1880s, it was apparent that the North Sea fishing grounds were becoming congested, with growing numbers of reports of “collisions,” conflict and lawless behaviour eventually leading to greater international co-operation in policing the North Sea. Previous attempts to improve bi-lateral Franco-British agreements in the late 1860s had proved less than successful, but in 1881 representatives of France, Britain, The Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark met in The Hague to establish a Convention that laid down an international code of conduct for the North Sea.25 Although this Convention, ratified by the states in the following year, was primarily concerned with the superintendence and policing of fisheries on the high seas, it also embraced an acceptance by key North Sea states of British definitions of three-mile territorial waters and thus fishery limits. Rather than tackling conservation issues, it provided something of a template for future international cooperation relating to offshore issues. At the time the Convention was passed, English trawlermen – and trawling at the time was still largely an English, not a Scottish, activity – had opened up grounds right across the North Sea, including some that were relatively close to the shores of other nations. It was thus in their interest that the narrow three-mile definitions of territorial waters gained international acceptance. In terms of methods and means of fish capture, much of the North Sea therefore remained a European common, waters where fishermen remained free to take fish whenever and by whatever means they preferred, subject only to the maintenance of internationally agreed codes of policing. The only limitations on the exploitation of fish stocks in international waters were market demand and human ingenuity in terms of fish capture – two variables that were improving rapidly at the time. Yet these international freedoms been hardly been confirmed when sections of the English trawling trade began to raise concerns about unrestricted exploitation of North Sea waters. Before 1880, those speaking for English trawling interests stuck strongly to the view that trawling could not affect the vitality of stocks on the high seas. Such beliefs, for example, were still prominently affirmed by many trawler owners and fishermen in the evidence they gave to the 1878 Buckland-Walpole enquiry, which had been convened in part to deal with renewed claims by line fishermen that their inshore grounds were being overfished by the recent introduction of paddle steam trawlers.26 But a clear shift in concern amongst some sections of the trawling fraternity that North Sea grounds were being overexploited became increasingly evident as

25 Jenkins, Sea Fisheries, 150–156. 26 Robinson, Trawling, 100.

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the 1880s wore on. Worries about stock depletion had been partly behind the creation of the National Sea Fisheries Protection Association in 1882, and at its annual conferences, especially from the late 1880s, calls were made for fishery authorities to regulate trawling at national and international levels. In 1890, a conference with delegates from North Sea trawling ports again called for legislative interferences of a national and international character and actually agreed a so-called Self-Denying Ordinance under which signatories pledged not to fish on particular grounds during the summer seasons; this apparently held for a time but then broke down. The Buckland-Walpole Commission did recommend the prohibition of trawling in inshore waters, but the state did not immediately follow this up and agitation continued to grow. Indeed, and in contrast to earlier national enquiries, statements from trawling interests expressing concern about the manner in which fish stocks were being exploited were laid before the 1885 Royal Commission on Trawling. This commission, from which Huxley had to withdraw through ill health, changed tack a little and actually conceded that trawling on “narrow grounds” and in inshore waters could affect fish stocks, but this was a long way from conceding that fishermen had the capability to damage the North Sea’s resource base. The Commission Report was the first to include a scientific study of trawling, carried out by Professor McIntosh of the University of St Andrews. Unfortunately, his research did not find favor with fishermen, who marched through his home town bearing aloft an effigy with a placard saying it represented “The reporter of the trawling commission,” which they burnt in front of Professor McIntosh’s residence, an event accompanied by cheers and hooting. When Professor Scott attempted to address them and assure them that Professor McIntosh had only told the truth, he was mobbed and obliged to desist,27 an unhappy opening chapter in the relationship between working fishermen and those involved with scientific investigation. However, claims that fishing activities could overfish stocks had also been dismissed by Huxley, who was now President of the Royal Society. As late as 1883, in an inaugural lecture given to the International Fisheries Exhibition, he declared that the cod, herring, and pilchard fisheries were inexhaustible, that human fisheries could not seriously affect fish stocks, and therefore it was useless to regulate such fisheries.28 He was backed in this by a number of colleagues, not least Spencer Walpole, co-author of the Buckland-Walpole Commission, who stated in a paper on the British fish trade given at the 1883 Exhibition that the destruction of fish by man was like a drop of water in a bucket when compared with the

27 Edinburgh Evening News, March 7, 1885. 28 Huxley, “Address,” 14.

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prodigious natural waste that occurred.29 However, some other members of the scientific fraternity already felt differently and their disquiet, also expressed during the 1883 Exhibition, most notably by E. Ray Lankester, led to the formation of the Marine Biological Association in 1884.30 Such disquiet proved timely: during this period when both Huxley and Walpole were reiterating their optimistic views about fish stocks, the nature of the fisheries was changing. Whatever the case before, mechanization drastically changed the equations and altered the impact that fishermen could have on the environment. As late as 1877, virtually every trawler was powered by sail. By 1900, the major trawling ports of Hull and Grimsby had almost completely replaced their sailing smacks with steam trawlers, whilst both North Shields and Aberdeen based their emergence as major trawling stations almost entirely on steam. In the 1890s, steam trawlers also replaced the traditional beam trawl with the much more efficient otter trawl. A study in the late 1890s by Walter Garstang of the Marine Biological Association estimated that steam trawlers had four times the efficiency of a similar sized sailing smack, while they could also range much further afield, bringing “fresh” fish to port from much more distant grounds, breaking the fish trade’s reliance on the North Sea for supplies.31 Steam fishing was probably making an impact on fishing grounds even before 1890. Indeed, in 1889, Huxley conceded that the recent introduction of steam vessels may have led to the debate over the exhaustion of fishing grounds entering a new phase, although he could not accept further legislative interference until long-term scientific investigations had been carried out. The science of marine biology was still in its infancy and the continued absence of statistical data did not make the challenges facing Huxley and his contemporaries any easier. Initially, railway companies had been required by the government to forward data on traffic from fishing ports over their lines, but it was not until the late 1880s that an overall system of recording landings of various species at different ports around the British Isles was introduced. Indeed, it was not until the early 1900s that data collection gave details of the grounds from which fish were taken. Part of the problem was that no one body had responsibility for the British fisheries. A brief survey of the division of fisheries-related responsibilities amongst various government organizations in the 1880s shows that the situation was complex and inconsistent. Both Scotland and Ireland had their own fishery boards, though the latter had more powers in terms of the creation of regulatory

29 Walpole, “British Fish Trade,” 64–69. 30 Ramster, “Fisheries Research,” 180–181. 31 Garstang, “Impoverishment.”

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by-laws. The Scottish board, based in Edinburgh, had undergone a somewhat complex process of evolution since its foundation in 1808 to oversee herring curing operations across Britain, and though its operations had been limited in theory to Scotland from 1850, it had, in practice, continued to oversee curing operations along the north Northumberland coast.32 Since the establishment of the Edinburgh-based organization in 1850, England and Wales had foregone the benefit of such a centralized authority as a fishery board, and a variety of departments had responsibilities for different operational aspects, such as manning, lighting, vessel registration, and international relations. There was even a small Salmon Fisheries Inspectorate, belonging to the Home Office, which figured in the estimates at a little more than £1,000 per year. As its name suggests, its activities were usually, though not always, quite circumscribed. Finally, there was a small office, under a Mr. Giffen, where statistics relating to the movement of fish by rail from ports to inland destinations were collated and recorded.33 The 1885 Royal Commission had recommended the creation of a centralized authority to supervise the fisheries of the British Isles. In the following year, the government responded by transferring the staff of the Salmon Fisheries Inspectorate from the Home Office to the Board of Trade and renaming it the Inspectorate of Sea Fisheries of England and Wales. Its remit was widened, a small, full-time inspectorate – initially three people – was created and charged with the production of an annual report and the collection of quayside statistics on landings by part-time officials. In Scotland, the Edinburgh-based Fishery Board was reconstituted and given wider powers; subsequently, the Board not only banned trawling within the three-mile limit, but also placed stretches of adjacent international waters out of bounds to British registered vessels. In the wake of the reorganization of local government in the late 1880s, the British Parliament passed legislation allowing the creation of local sea fisheries committees, funded by local government. These were given certain powers to regulate fisheries activities within the three-mile limit on different sections of the English coast and pass by-laws subject to Home Office approval. They were also empowered to appoint fishery officers to enforce these regulations and provide guidance and supervision. Annual meetings of representatives of the various fishery districts were held each year to share experiences and co-ordinate activities.34 The main shortcomings of such fishery districts were that their supervision in terms of actual fishing operations only covered waters within the three-mile

32 Robinson, “English Fishing Industry,” 261. 33 Hansard, March 5, 1888. 34 Burton, “Local Fisheries Administration,” 174–176.

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territorial limits, while their funding, which was reliant on local authorities rather than central government, remained tight. Nevertheless, in the years down to the Great War these committees not only became actively involved in the formulation and policing of by-laws, but also commissioned reports on different fisheries issues and provided fishermen and central government alike with relevant briefings. Another report was published in 1893, this time by the Select Committee on Sea Fisheries, which recognized national calls for greater regulation of international waters, and recommended that the British Government should work with coastal continental states to find a means of supervising international waters. In order to understand better the nature of the holistic exploitation of North Sea waters, the same Select Committee and the Stockholm International Conference of 1899 concluded that it would be desirable to collect internationally uniform data regarding the number, weight, value, and origin of fish landed, in addition to details regarding method of capture and crew size. In 1903, the collection of fishery statistics in the British Isles was modified to take account of these recommendations. At the same time, there was a further reorganization of the fisheries administration structure south of the Scottish border, with responsibility for the English and Welsh sea fisheries passing from the Board of Trade to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. Initially, in terms of fisheries, the new Board of Agriculture and Fisheries had less effective power than its Scottish and Irish counterparts, and seems to have been primarily concerned with the collection of data. It also endeavored to coordinate the work of the English district sea fisheries committees, but its scope was considerably increased from 1910 when it also assumed overall responsibility for the conduct of England and Wales’s share of international scientific investigations that had previously been the responsibility of the Marine Biological Association.35 The growth in the scientific study of marine biology during the 1890s was accompanied by a movement away from the views supported by Huxley in the previous decade. The pioneering work of Walter Garstang’s investigations into trawling, which led to his ground-breaking study The Impoverishment of the Sea, published by the Marine Biological Association, lent scientific credibility to the view that some fish stocks were subject to overfishing.36 Further investigations by a number of international researchers, not least Holt and Cunningham in the UK, Hjort in Norway, and the Germans Hensen and Heinke, strengthened the arguments of those adhering to such views, as did a series of conferences, the first

35 Jenkins, Sea Fisheries, 246–247. 36 Garstang, “Impoverishment of the Sea,” 48–52.

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of which was held in Sweden in 1899.37 The outcome of this greater co-operation was the creation in 1902 in Oslo of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the main object of which was to study the effects of fishing on stocks that were of common international interest.38 Clearly, if human activity could affect the vitality of fish stocks in international waters then any policies or strategies required to reduce the impact of mechanized fishing would need to apply to all waters whether under State jurisdiction or open seas. However, within the British catching sector, the impact of technological change, most notably in the British trawling trade, had already begun to alter the tone of the arguments surrounding the extent of a nation’s territorial waters and fishery limits. The introduction of steel-hulled trawlers with triple expansion marine engines greatly improved the potential economy and range of trawlers. Many of the smaller English sailing trawler owners, so reliant on North Sea fishing grounds, went bankrupt and were replaced by highly capitalized steam trawling concerns that increasingly focused on distant waters. In the early 1890s, steam trawlers had begun fishing off Faroe and Iceland, and after 1904 they began trawling in the Barents Sea. With the North Sea becoming marginally less important as a source of white fish for British markets, the new steam trawling companies opened up distant water grounds close to the shores of other states, which developed very different views on fishery limits to those prevalent amongst some sections of the sail fishing fraternity in the 1880s and early 1890s. There were key figures in the new steam trawling sector who were keen to embrace and continue scientific research. Some leading trawler owners, most notably perhaps George and James Alward of Grimsby, were not only in the vanguard of the development of steam trawling technology, but also keen to support what they saw as important conservation regulations. During the 1880s, the brothers emerged as leading spokesmen for the national fishing industry. While James occupied an important place in the leadership of the National Sea Fisheries Protection Association from its formation in the early 1880s, George became an influential member of the North-Eastern District Sea Fisheries Committee and an executive member of the National Association of Sea Fisheries Committees. From the mid-1880s, both brothers strongly advocated national and international regulations aimed at preventing or restricting the capture and sale of young and undersized flat fish. The brothers also funded and oversaw early investigation work aimed at tracing the migration of fish, helping to set up a system of weighing, marking, and releasing fish, as well as collating details of those subsequently

37 Cushing, Arctic Cod, 22. 38 Robinson, “English Fishing Industry,” 256.

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recaptured. These experiments were a precursor to later state-sponsored research in this field. George Alward not only helped the marine biologist Walter Garstang locate and collect statistics for his groundbreaking study, but by the early twentieth century he was a Council Member of the Marine Biological Association and one of the few – perhaps the only – former working fishermen then amongst its ranks.39 However, influential elements of the British trawling trade, who were by then rapidly extending the exploitation of distant water grounds adjacent to other nations, often did not perceive it as in their interest to encourage the expansion of state fishery limits beyond the now widely agreed three-mile limits. The views of many influential steam trawling companies were perhaps most clearly expressed by Charles Hellyer, probably the greatest Edwardian trawling tycoon, who told a 1908 Government commission: any such tampering with the three-mile limit is in our opinion pregnant with international difficulties . . . Because we have to approach other people’s shores to bring fish to England.40

George Alward agreed on this perception of territorial waters and fishery limits. He told the same commission that whilst he had long favored conservation legislation, he had previously advocated the prohibition of landing undersized fish and now accepted that minimum mesh sizes might be effective. However, he remained opposed to moves that questioned initial perceptions of territorial waters and fishery limits.41 This contrasted with the views of some fishermen who worked closer to shore, not least in Scotland.42 In this respect, Alward’s views reflected those of the rest of the influential steam trawling interest, which had strongly and consistently opposed the by-laws introduced by the Scottish Fishery Board to prevent British registered vessels fishing in the Moray Firth and in areas outside territorial waters.43 Nevertheless, although Britain and many other North Sea states thought that their concepts of fishery limits were enshrined in international law, this did not stop a number of coastal states, notably Iceland, the Faroes, and Norway, from challenging this concept and pushing for greater national control of international waters. Such claims met with little success down to 1945. In the decades following 39 Robinson, “Alward, George Lowe.” 40 BPP, 1908, XIII, Committee on Sea Fisheries Investigations, Minutes of Evidence, 8711–8750. 41 BPP, 1908, XIII, Committee on Sea Fisheries Investigations, Minutes of Evidence. 42 Coull, Sea Fisheries, 144 43 To get round this prohibition, some British trawling interests registered their vessels in foreign countries that did not recognise Britain’s right to protect fisheries outside of territorial limits. See Coull, Sea Fisheries, 149–150.

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the Second World War, however, it became apparent that the seas, and seabed, contained other scarce resources that could be exploited; accordingly, the arguments of the states that favored broader national jurisdictions of the adjacent seabed became more influential and harder to resist. Eventually, in the mid1970s, this led to the creation of Exclusive Economic Zones, which gave coastal states extensive powers to not only exploit resources, but also implement policies intended to conserve fish stocks within their extended area of jurisdiction. The waters surrounding the United Kingdom, whose governments had long supported a narrow definition of fishery limits, were ironically then to be covered by the Common Fisheries Policy after the country’s entry into the Common Market. During the twentieth century, more resources were invested in fisheries research, which increased in both quantity and quality. However, as our understanding of the marine ecosystem has improved so too has our ingenuity in taking fish stocks from the oceans, a process fuelled by a rapidly increasing global demand for fish products. Governments have proved slow to agree and implement conservation methods, with initial attempts to restrict the landings and sale of many undersized sea fish in Britain failing in the early twentieth century, while British fishermen were still allowed to go deep sea fishing with nets below a certain size before the 1930s. Though Huxley’s original views on the inexhaustibility of sea fish stocks has long since been refuted, it remains extremely difficult to maintain or effectively restore the ecological and biological health of fish stocks and our oceans. Other issues need to be taken into account, including the increasing efficiency of fishing vessels and growing global demand for marine foodstuffs, to say nothing of dealing with the political, social, and cultural considerations associated with managing fishing communities, fleets, and ports. When it comes to agreeing on the management of the oceans and their biological stocks in the fairest and most sustainable way, the governments of different nations, fishermen, and scientists – now joined by the growing ranks of conservationists – all too often appear to remain enmeshed in what seem like age-old differences, disagreements, and disputes. In addition, such fisheries controversies are certainly enduring, continuing through the eras of Cod Wars, Exclusive Economic Zones, and Common Fisheries Policies. Perhaps many of the basic issues facing exploitation of the fisheries in the twenty-first century remain in some respects all too similar to those facing our mid-nineteenth century counterparts.

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Bibliography Barback, Ronald H. The Political Economy of the Fisheries. Hull: University of Hull Press, 1996. BPP, 1849, LIX, Report to the Treasury by J.G. Shaw-Lefevre on the Fishery Board. BPP, 1866, XVII-XVIII, Royal Commission on the Sea Fisheries. BPP, 1908, XIII, Committee on Sea Fisheries Investigations. Bruijn, Jaap R. “Dutch Fisheries: An Historical Perspective and Thematic Review.” In The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100–1976: National Perspectives on a Common Resource, edited by Poul Holm, David J. Starkey and Jón Th Thór, 105–120. Esbjerg: Fiskeri-og Søfartsmuseet, 1996. Burton, Angela. “Local Fisheries Administration Since 1888.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales Since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid and Neil Ashcroft, 174–179. London: Chatham Press, 2000. Caird, James. English Agriculture in 1850-1. London: Longman Brown, 1852. Clarke, G. S. “The Location and Development of the Hull Fishing Industry.” MSc Thesis, University of Hull, 1957. Coull, James. The Sea Fisheries of Scotland: A Historical Geography. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996. Cushing, D. H. The Arctic Cod: A Study of Research into the British Trawl Fisheries. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966. Garstang, Walter. “The Impoverishment of the Sea.” Journal of the Marine Biological Association, VI (1900). Gray, Malcolm. The Fishing Industry of Scotland 1790–1914. Aberdeen: OUP for Aberdeen University, 1979. Huxley, Thomas Henry. “Address to the Inaugural Meeting of the Fishery Congress.” Fisheries Exhibition Literature IV (1883): 14. Jenkins, J. T., The Sea Fisheries. London: Constable & Co., 1920. Michell, Tony R. “The Evolution of North Sea Fisheries with Special Reference to the Delta Area.” In The Rhine-Meuse-Sheldt Delta and its Hinterland, edited by P.W.Klein and J.H.P. Paelinck, 92–102. Rotterdam: Looveren, 1979. Ramster, John. “Fisheries Research in England and Wales, 1850–1980.” In England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, edited by David J. Starkey, Chris Reid and Neil Ashcroft, 179–187. London: Chatham Press, 2000. Roberts, Calum. The Unnatural History of the Sea. London: Island Press, 2007. Robinson, Robb. “The English Fishing Industry 1790–1914: A Case Study of the Yorkshire Coast.” PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 1985. Robinson, Robb. Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996. Robinson, Robb. “The Evolution of Some Key Elements of British Fisheries Policy.” International Journal of Maritime History IX (1997): 129–150. Robinson, Robb. “The Fisheries of Northwest Europe, c1100–1850.” In A History of the North Altlantic Fisheries, Volume 1: From Early Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, edited by David J. Starkey, Jón Thór and Ingo Heidbrink, 127–171. Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, 2009.

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Robinson, Robb. “Alward, George Lowe (1842–1933) Trawler Owner.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Robinson, Robb. Fishermen, the Fishing Industry and the Great War at Sea. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: 1776, reprinted 1946. Walpole, Spencer. “The British Fish Trade.” Fisheries Exhibition Literature IV (1883).

Chris Reid

5 Underutilization, Undersupply, and Overfishing in the Herring Industry 1930–1980: A Case Study in the Evolution of Britain’s Productivist Fisheries Policy Adam Smith had much to say about subsidising commercial sea fisheries, little of it good.1 As the World Bank’s influential Sunken Billions study of the growth of fisheries subsidies showed, his views have been more honored in the breach than in the observance.2 Subsidies, though, were but one aspect of fisheries policies that developed in the developed economies. Across the North East Atlantic, governments created finance and technology programmes to achieve policy goals, such as food security, export revenue, regional employment, and maintaining a naval reserve. Governments have long seen advantages in supporting sea fisheries, with the post1945 “great acceleration” taking fisheries development to a new level. This involved institution-building and policy development that, for Holm, “to a large degree determined the environmental impacts of the fishing industry between 1945 and 1975.”3 This chapter focuses on institutions and policies developed for Britain’s herring industry and their contribution to the intensification of fishing through to 1980. Creating the Herring Industry Board in 1935 represented a new approach towards the sector that emulated productivist policies adopted for British agriculture, intended to create a modern industry for the maritime periphery. Fishing was a minor business in Britain compared to its importance in smaller coastal states in the region, such as Denmark, Iceland, and Norway. But it exerted a disporportionate influence on the public imagination. Britain’s contribution to the herring overfishing problem of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was arguably less prominent in comparison to Denmark and Norway. Both economies became enthusiastic industrial fishers, taking small pelagic fish as the raw material for conversion into fishmeal and oil, used mainly as (respectively) animal feed and the manufacture of margarine. Each was also ahead of Britain in the use of pelagic (midwater) trawl and purse seine fishing gears to realize the more

1 Rieser, “Herring Enlightenment,” 600–619. 2 World Bank, Sunken Billions, 17–18. 3 Holm, “World War II and the ‘Great Acceleration’,” 81. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-006

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intensive harvesting necessary to occupy the “reduction” factories. Britain chose an alternative development strategy to address problems of underutilization and inefficiency identified in the 1930s, viewing herring as a food fish for domestic consumption and export. It nonetheless accommodated the use of reduction as the mechanism by which the market at first sale could be regulated. While this did not create the elastic demand for fish of the true industrial fishery, the British model did entail a step-change in market behavior and increase in pressure on resources, since the Board envisaged a permanent surplus of production over the needs of merchants. And in common with the mercantilist pamphleteers who admired the Dutch herring busses, the Board saw new approaches to fishing and resource abundancy as a mechanism to increase the wealth of the nation. What the British case study demonstrates is how the growing appreciation of overfishing transformed the opportunities presented by reduction and new fishing methods into threats to the herring industry’s wellbeing and, eventually in the 1970s, its entire existence. The government created the Herring Industry Board in 1935 to administer this branch of the fishing industry. In just over four decades the Board was redundant: it had nothing left to administer. This chapter is organized as follows. First, it considers the introduction of productivism to fisheries policy and the role of the Herring Industry Board. It then examines the Board’s use of reduction to solve what it considered the industry’s central problem, the underutilization of catches. While the Board had always pursued efficiency through the adoption of new technology, this became more urgent with the emergence of an undersupply problem in the early 1960s. The chapter subsequently examines the introduction of new fishing methods and their contribution to the region’s overfishing problem, illustrating the difficulties in reconciling growth-oriented industrial policy with the characteristics of fishing. The study concludes that while historians have recognized the role of technology in promoting overfishing, it is important to understand the contribution of the underlying policy regime to the growth of the fisheries problem. The Herring Industry Board policies were orthodox by contemporary standards. Unfortunately, commercial fishing has a way of turning normality on its head.

Productivism and the Board The British government largely let Victorian and Edwardian fishers “get on with seeking profits.”4 And it did the same after the war. But the 1920s were 4 Hubbard, “Changing Regimes,” 139.

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difficult for the inshore and near-water fisheries and catastrophic for a herring industry that saw its trade permanently decline.5 Following several investigations of fishing – prices,6 the market for Empire seafood,7 and economic organisation8– the government constituted the Sea-Fish Commission to direct policy development. It would recommend new institutions to provide support along productivist lines as envisaged for agriculture. The Commission produced two reports for the herring and white fish trades.9 On its recommendation the government instituted a Herring Industry Board in 1935 and a White Fish Commission in 1938. Outside the civil service and independent of the English and Scottish fisheries administrations, these “public corporations” guided industrial policy for fishing through to the Common Fisheries Policy era. Developments in policy towards the fisheries strongly echoed the broader productivism developments in agriculture associated with Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries in the National Government, Walter Elliot. Cooper’s characterization of Elliot’s approach to agriculture, entailing reorganization, requipment, and specialization in the attempt to impose order and discipline on trades lacking either, is equally applicable to his ambition for the fishing industry.10 The identification of fishing’s emerging institutions and plans with Elliot’s agenda was reinforced when Elliot replaced the chair of the Scottish Home Department report on the industry’s post-war reorganisation.11 Elliot’s analysis and recommendations were the most complete statement of the productivist approach in fisheries policy and provided an operational blueprint to which the Herring Industry Board remained true for all its days. Two features of the new approach to fisheries were noteworthy departures from earlier policy. First, the Board and Commission were to impose order and purpose upon an industry perceived to lack either. Unlike the trawl fisheries, where larger companies had emerged in the main centres, the herring trade and inshore fisheries were networks of small businesses that caught, processed, and distributed at Britain’s smaller fishing stations. Scottish boats were, the Commission noted, mostly share-owned ventures, and while company operation was more

5 Coull, “Scottish Herring Fishery,” 55–81 6 BPP, Food Council Report on Fish Prices, 1927. 7 BPP, Imperial Economic Committee Report, 1927. 8 BPP, Report of the Economic Advisory Council Committee on the Fishing Industry, 1932. 9 BPP, Sea Fish Commission: First Report, The Herring Industry, 1934; BPP, Sea Fish Commission: Second Report, The White Fish Industry, 1936. 10 Cooper, British Agricultural Policy, 1912–36, 160–183. 11 BPP, Report of the Scottish Home Department Committee on the Herring Industry [Elliott Committee], 1944.

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characteristic of the main herring ports in East Anglia, these were not large firms as found on Humberside. There were larger firms in the curing trades, typically organizing artisanal production. Much of the herring business was itinerant, following the fishing. A diversity of trade associations represented different stakeholder interests, all too small to provide leadership. An absence of oversight had not hindered the Edwardian steam drifter boom. But it was catastrophic in the 1920s when the collective response to collapse of its markets was to hope that trade would somehow improve. This had evidently not happened by the 1930s, and the Sea-Fish Commission argued that “the industry stands in urgent need of re-organisation, and that both a governing body and a basic structure are indispensible pre-requisistes if the fullest economic results are to be obtained from reorganisation.”12 The Board was to offer the strategic leadership the trades could not provide for themselves and which the English and Scottish fisheries administrations were disinclined to provide. Recognizing the risk aversion that ran through the herring trades, the Board listed “discarding old and worn out customs” as a prerequisite for modernisation.13 Second, productivism policies are synonymous with innovation. Investigations prior to the Sea-Fish Commission suggested scope for improvement in how the business exploited the sea’s natural capital. Productivist policies for agriculture and fisheries viewed science and technology as instruments for raising yields, cutting costs, and reducing imports. Despite glimpses of innovation between the wars, transforming the fish supply chain would not begin in earnest until after the war. Elliot’s recommendation that the Board be reconstituted was followed. The white fish trade had no such champion and, as Wilcox details, would wait unhappily until the 1950s for the formation of the White Fish Authority.14 In common with other fisheries development agencies across the region, including the Authority, the Board used a combination of government grants and levies on catches to offer financial and technical support, helping to finance modernization. Public research promoted the new technologies that changed fishing, processing, and distribution.15 Most importantly, the Board gave the herring industry the leadership Elliot envisaged, which was witheld from the rest of the fishing industry until the 1950s. Policymakers did not seek to modernize fishing naively. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries employed some of the world’s most eminent fisheries scientists. But the “wickedness” of the fisheries problem would not fully reveal

12 13 14 15

BPP, Sea Fish Commission, First Report, 37. HIB, Second Annual Report for the year ending 31 March 1937, 4. Wilcox, “‘To Save the Industry from Complete Ruin’.” Reid, “Managing Innovation,” 281–295.

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itself until the “great accelaration” had unfolded. In following the lead of agriculture, policymakers faced obstacles not found on land.16 First, they held imperfect information about production. As with many disciplines, fisheries science underwent a profound transformation through the 1950s and 1960s. Competition between ideas drives scientific progress, but is unwelcome when forming and implementing policy. Second, and following this point, scientific uncertainty about stocks translates into uncertainty among policymakers and fishers about the existence, extent, and consequences of overfishing, particularly when depletion is a process gradually revealed over time. Technologists and fishermen do not calibrate the success and impact of their activities through the same methods and evidence as fisheries scientists and are unlikely to reach the same conclusions at the same time. Finally, fishing is a highly politicized business practically everywhere it happens. British parliamentarians took an interest in fishing disproportionate to the industry’s size, perhaps because one quarter of their constituencies included a stretch of coast or estuary. Policymakers face difficult trade-offs between objectives, and often an often impossible challenge in reconciling wants of domestic stakeholders with international obligations towards shared resources. Reviewing the experience of fisheries development, Bailey and Jentoft suggested that “anticipating the impact of a fishery development project on the resource is restricted to guesswork and unreliable extrapolation from past experience elsewhere.”17 Perhaps so, but how much harder still for the Board and other emerging institutions who could not follow precedent? Their uneviable task was to establish the norms of fisheries development and draw the ire of its critics.

Reduction and the Underutilization Problem The Herring Industry Board’s greatest challenge was underutilization of catches. The very real hardship experienced by fishers and processors between the wars was due to underutilization of the catch. As herring fishers discovered, it was relatively easy to commission a steam drifter when markets appeared unlimited. It was altogether more challenging to sell a mortgaged steam drifter past its prime when the boom was over. The Board began work when supply was not creating demand. As The Economist observed in comments on the Sea-Fish Industry Bill, Elliot was inclined to address overproduction by moderating supply instead of

16 Underdal, Politics of International Fisheries Management, 66–68. 17 Bailey and Jentoft, “Hard Choices in Fisheries Development,” 333–344.

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increasing demand.18 The Sea-Fish Commission, established when the bill was passed, described a market both dependent upon and constrained by the capacity of labour-intensive processors. It accepted that export markets would never return to Edwardian levels. There would be no salvation at home; its research showed British households consuming less herring in all forms.19 The Board’s attempts to resolve disequilibrium between supply and demand in the 1930s were limited by the difficulties of coordinating a dispersed and disparate industry. But it was “extremely doubtful” that fishmeal was the answer.20 The productivist case for reduction was articulated in Elliot’s recommendations for the post-war industry, reflecting his corporatist inclinations.21 His report redesignated surplus production: it would be an engine of growth, not a constraint.22 Market uncertainly inhibited progress but markets could be stablized by planned overproduction. Reconstituted following the 1944 Herring Industry Act, the Board followed Elliot’s lead and forcefully argued that surplus landings would be neither unfortunate nor unremunerative. Neither self-regulation of catches nor careful market coordination could eliminate surpluses or attract participants back to their trades. Furthermore, it was unconscionable to limit catches in protein-deficient post-war Britain. A large and viable fleet could not survive by compensating losses on unsold fish by returns from limited high value buyers. All sectors of the trade would need to accept that their future depended on deliberate overproduction. This demanded a vent for oversupply that would not prejudice other markets. Quick-freezing could not fulfil this role; large inventories would eventually depress quayside prices. This was not true of reduction, as herring fishmeal and oil were independent of other markets. Having discounted other options, reduction became the cornerstone of a “doctrine of maximum utilisation of maximum production.”23 The Board maintained its underutilization approach until it concluded in the early 1960s that undersupply had become the more urgent problem. As shown in Figure 5.1, the Board set ambitious targets for herring utilisation by 1951 in its first post-war report.24 It argued that a surplus of one-third of the catch was necessary, subsequently converted to fishmeal and oil. The Board remained wedded to this target throughout the period in question, anticipating that that it would achieve it by 1951. It did not, and targets were revised downwards by

18 The Economist, July 1, 1933, 11. 19 BPP, Sea Fish Commission, First Report, 35. 20 HIB, First Annual Report for the period ending 31 March 1936 (London: HMSO), 10. 21 Cooper, British Agricultural Policy, 167–168. 22 BPP, Report on the Herring Industry. 23 HIB, First Annual Report, 16. 24 HIB, Eleventh Annual Report for the year ending 31 March 1946, 24.

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200 180

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1947 1946 target

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Figure 5.1: Targets for herring reduction compared to disposal of catching for fishmeal and oil 1946–1952 (tonnes). Source: derived from Herring Industry Board, Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1946–1953).

between 30 to 40 percent in 1949, as the Board appreciated the practical difficulties in building plant and looked to short-term schemes using existing fishmeal plants as best as possible.25 In Figure 5.1, it can be seen that the quantity of the catch sent for reduction remained below the Board’s aspiration, standing at less than half the revised target in 1952. However, one-third of the catch was sent for reduction in 1952, which exceeded the total quantity of herring bought to process for export. Figure 5.2 illustrates landings of herring by UK fishers then utilized for reduction between 1946 and 1977. The long-run decline of the UK herring industry after a brief post-war recovery is evident, reaching a steady 90–100,000 tonnes per annum in the early 1960s before a short-lived rejuvenation in the mid-1960s that preceded the decline and closure of the fishery. This “recovery” was entirely attributable to the adoption of purse seining and pelagic trawling and the concentration of fishing on the Buchan and West of Scotland grounds. Herring decreased as a proportion of British wet fish landings from the peak of 1913, when they accounted for more than half of all fish caught and one third of total value. The share of production showed a persistent decline through to the mid-1960s, when herring was one-eighth of volume and only 5 percent of total value, at which point herring’s

25 HIB, Fourteenth Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 1949, 42.

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300

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250 200 150 100 50

19 46 19 48 19 50 19 52 19 54 19 56 19 58 19 60 19 62 19 64 19 66 19 68 19 70 19 72 19 74 19 76

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Reduction

Figure 5.2: UK herring landings and quantity allocated to reduction, 1946–1977. Source: derived from Herring Industry Board, Annual Report (London and Edinburgh: HMSO, 1946–1977).

status as a distinct branch of the fishing industry was questionable.26 Landings had decreased on average by some 2 percent per annum between 1920 and 1938; this rate of decline doubled up to the late 1950s. Figure 5.2 also shows the quantity of herring taken for reduction purposes over the same period. For a decade from 1948, reduction absorbed about onequarter of all herring landed. Responsibility for reduction rested with the Ministry of Food until April 1948, and it was some time before the Board was able to bring sufficient productive capacity into operation. The proportion taken for reduction increased substantially during the early 1950s to a peak of over 100,000 tonnes in 1953, some 45 percent of catches. However, this level of utilization was not sustained, decreasing in absolute and relative terms to the end of the decade when reduction took about 20 percent of landings. The industry’s position worsened during the 1960s: in 1962, only 1,246 tonnes of herring were taken by reduction factories, about 1.4% of the catch. Whatever quantity of herring was taken to the fishmeal factory, the British herring industry thought of itself as fishing herring primarily for consumption, and the Board’s commitment to pursuing all possible technical and market innovations was unequivocal. But other countries in the North East Atlantic looked to develop true

26 The Fleck Committee had recommended that the Board be merged with the White Fish Authority.

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industrial fisheries. Norway had gone further than other countries in developing its herring fishmeal and oil business between the wars. It operated almost 80 fishmeal plants in the mid-1930s, and reduction for meal and oil absorbed some two-thirds of winter herring production.27 Rapid post-war development of the fishmeal industry was extensively supported by the Norwegian government. Iceland’s herring meal industry also developed considerably in the 1930s; catches doubled over the 1930s and the proportion used for reduction increased from 70 percent in 1930 to 90 percent by 1937.28 As FAO’s Fisheries Division’s chief economist Gerhard Gerhardsen suggested to the 1950 meeting on herring utilization, reduction was the single most important technological development in the pelagic fisheries of the past 30 years.29 Gerhardsen predicted further development in the industrial fisheries, noting that Chile was producing a few hundred tonnes of meal while there was also growth in South Africa and Namibia (South West Africa).30 Gerhardsen’s prediction of further rapid development was accurate and prescient as Peru became the world’s leading fishing nation through its anchoveta fishmeal trade.31 Industrial pelagic fisheries would pioneer the adoption of new fishing methods, synthetic fibres, and electronic aids to navigation and shoal location. Unfortunately, the consequences of intensifying fishing for a market with no practical limit were quickly manifest in the state of North East Atlantic herring stocks. Norway reinforced the position of the leading herring fishing nation it inherited from Britain. Catches and production exhibited a marked increase from 1946, rising rapidly through to the peak of the winter herring fishery in 1956, when landings were approximately 1.15 million tonnes, of which 80 percent was sent for reduction. While the Norwegian experience was exceptional there was a broader trend towards the utilization of herring and other small pelagic fish for fishmeal across Western Europe; according to the OEEC the share of the catch disposed of in this way increased from 38 percent in 1948 to about 49 percent for 1954–58.32 The resulting impact on fish stocks transformed an underutilization problem into an undersupply problem. Traditional remedies – relocation and innovation – exacerbated the decline of the region’s herring fisheries to the point where prohibition of fishing was the only feasible response.

27 FAO, Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics 1947, 280; Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway, Historical Statistics 1978, 184. 28 Gerhardsen, “Herring Marketing Situation,” 56. 29 Gerhardsen, “Herring Marketing Situation,” 56. 30 Gerhardsen, “Herring Marketing Situation,” 74. 31 Roemer, Fishing for Growth. 32 OEEC, Fishery Policies, 39.

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The pursuit of reduction as a strategy to stabilize the herring industry was not, when measured in employment of boats and workers, catches, and market value, an incontestable success. But the Board inherited decline and arguably mitigated an otherwise quicker and more painful adjustment to lower participation and output. It faced real difficulties in building fishmeal plants in the 1940s and early 1950s, which meant that the Board expended grants for capital expenditure on running more expensive short-run schemes. There were also difficulties in reconciling the dispersed seasonal pattern of landings that suited curers with the reduction operation. The costs of shipping surplus herring from small outlying ports to the factories placed an additional financial burden on the Board, particularly after complaints about nuisance arising from bulk shipment by rail and road in 1953 required transfer of surplus fish in steel drums that the Board had to procure.33 A strategy of developing an industrial fishery in the Norwegian image may have been simpler and more profitable. But this was not part of the Elliot plan and could not have carried fishers or processors in the 1940s. The herring reduction business also faced competition from white fish and fishmeal imports. After evisceration, heading, and filleting after landing, only about half the weight of white fish landings made their way into the food chain. Filleting at the large white fish ports was encouraged during the First World War, creating a concentrated supply of raw material for reduction; the Hull Fish Meal and Oil Company was operating three large plants by the 1920s, processing some 80,000 tonnes of waste per annum.34 The White Fish Authority reported production of nearly 75,000 tonnes of fishmeal in 1952, about ten times the quantity of herring meal produced. While fishmeal production was steady through the 1950s, the quantity of herring sent for reduction showed a decrease from the peak of 1953.35 All domestic fishmeal production came under greater pressure through the 1950s due to the greater penetration of imports. Britain was the largest net importer of seafood products in Western Europe through the 1940s and 1950s. And it was also one of the largest importers of fishmeal. Imports increased steadily through the 1940s and 1950s, standing at some 150,000 tonnes by 1959. Approximately 40 percent of fishmeal imported in 1959 came from Denmark and Norway, onequarter coming from South Africa and Namibia, and one-fifth from Peru. As a Board of Trade memo from 1960 pointed out, imports from Peru had in a short time caused a reduction in the price of fish meal that British producers could not

33 HIB, Nineteenth Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1953, 31. 34 Robinson, Trawling, 151. 35 WFA, Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 1960, 27.

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match. This was likely to reduce the sums returned to trawling companies by some £2–2.5 million per annum, possibly requiring a review of subsidy arrangements. But officials suggested, not for the first time, that while competition from trade might be bad for the fishing industry, this was more than compensated by the benefits of greater supplies and lower prices for consumers, in this case British farmers. The greater majority of imports came either from the Commonwealth or from fellow members of the European Free Trade Association, substantially reducing the scope for protection.36 The impact of the Peruvian reduction fisheries from the late 1950s would be felt globally, the rapid decrease in prices in northern fisheries increasing the “treadmill effect,” where firms attempt look to increase productivity through innovation in order to mitigate decreases in income. The UK would continue to be one of the world’s largest importers of fishmeal and oil throughout the 1960s and 1970s.37 For its part, the Herring Industry Board continued to insist that reduction was necessary to ensure supplies for consumption even when its principal problem had become one of undersupply.

The Undersupply Problem Stabilizing demand through reduction was only one aspect of a modernization strategy that included support for capital investment and technical innovation. This turned out to be the work of two decades; a new herring industry emerged in the mid-1960s. Reduction arguably supported an orderly contraction of the industry through to the late 1950s. There was a substantial restructuring of the fleet after the war; the number of steam drifters decreased from 319 in 1946 to 32 in 1955, and the age of steam finally concluded in 1960. Younger fishers were less inclined to specialize in herring fishing around the coast, preferring to fish regionally from boats that could seine for white fish or fit out for drifting. This tendency was reinforced by the distribution of subsidies for the inshore fisheries by the White Fish Authority and a decline in herring fishing opportunities. This was clearly seen in the East Anglian autumn fishery. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft were historic centres of the herring trade through to the Edwardian boom. Landings at these ports gently declined between the wars, but still stood at 85,000 tonnes in 1948. They decreased quickly from the early 1950s with the decline of North Sea stocks, largely through industrial fishing by trawlers,38

36 TNA, MAF 255–993, Peruvian Fish Meal. Board of Trade Memorandum, 24 March 1960. 37 Campbell and Alder, “Fishmeal and Fish Oil,” 47–66. 38 Burd, “Long Term Changes,” 140.

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falling to about 45,000 tonnes in 1954, 19,000 tonnes in 1955, and then about 10,000 tonnes in 1958. The East Anglian experience epitomised how underutilization of a surplus was, by the late 1950s, overshadowed by undersupply. The Board estimated the deficit at 40 percent of landings in 1962; analysis for 1964–1967 from the University of Strathclyde suggested it was a third of landings. Strathclyde projected that demand could grow by 40 percent by 1980, possibly more if reduction was expanded.39 This forecast seemed propitious, since the industry was seemingly entering an era of higher productivity. Unfortunately, higher productivity would be short-lived and unsustained. British fishers mostly prosecuted a drift net fishery, supplemented by a Scottish ring net operation. The Board’s 1966 Annual Report was the first to report landings by trawl and purse seine. This marked the emergence of a new, more productive, and ultimately short-lived modern herring industry. The Board had explored the potential of new fishing methods from immediately after the war, but by the 1960s had enjoyed greater success in modernising drifting. The undersupply problem accelerated the Board’s promotion of modernity, arguing that any resolution required “fishing methods capable of securing a larger catch per unit of effort.”40 The drift net is a “passive” fishing technique, in which a row of nets is set in the sea in the hope or expectation that they will enmesh herring as they rise to the surface to feed at night. Shoal location technology, such the echo sounder and asdic (sonar), had helped fishers improve their strategies when setting gear and improve the chances of correctly predicting the course of a shoal. Pelagic trawls and purse seines are “active” fishing methods. Once a shoal is located, the gear is employed directly in its capture; trawls are dragged through the shoal while the purse seine is set to encircle the fish before the bottom of the “purse” is closed, trapping the prey. Figure 5.3 shows how the “new” methods quickly dominated the fishery. They accounted for a majority of landings by 1969 and thereafter quickly displaced traditional fisheries. Patterns of adoption and displacement are shown in Figure 5.3 by fitting a logistic growth model to the share of the catch taken by old and new methods, suggesting that change closely followed the classic pattern of diffusion, the speed of adjustment suggesting that “Britain’s most antiquated” industry was perfectly capable of change.41 Adoption was driven by a clear productivity differential. Steam drifters built in the boom were significantly more effective, catching on average 1.5–3.75 times

39 HIB, Thirty-third Annual Report for year ended 31 December 1967, 42. 40 HIB, Thirty-first annual report for the year ended 31 December 1965, 22. 41 Tunstall, “Fish: An antiquated Industry,” 171–197.

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Figure 5.3: Proportion of the catch taken by ‘old’ (drift and ring net) and ‘new’ (trawl and purse seine) fishing methods 1966–77 (observed and fitted growth model). Source: derived from Herring Industry Board, Annual Report (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1967–1978).

as much per trip as a first-class sail drifter. As Figure 5.4 suggests, similar advantages were available in the 1960s. The average catch per day in the West of Scotland fishery between the mid-1960s and 1970s demonstrated the superiority of the new methods. Pelagic trawl was approximately 1.5–1.7 times as productive as drift and ring net in the 1960s. The relative effectiveness of the purse seine was even greater, on average catching 2 to 3.5 times more than boats using drift nets. Productivity differentials increased significantly in the 1970s as experience with the new methods increased and use of the drift net became the provenance of those unwilling to change. There was no mania to build new boats as in the Edwardian boom. This reflected the extent of fleet modernization already completed with support from the Board’s grants and loans. Vessels operating in the early 1960s fishery were typically multipurpose designs, capable of fitting out for drifting for herring or seining for white fish. These were sufficiently powerful to accommodate new fishing methods, although the modern drifter-seiner made a better trawler than purse seiner. Some problems of adaptation were inevitable, given that drift net fishing had been preferred for centuries. The Board had endeavored to address misunderstandings and reservations since the 1940s by taking groups of British fishers abroad to observe herring fishing in new contexts and hiring foreign fishers to share their knowledge, often with limited results. But by the early 1960s, a younger generation of fishers accustomed to switching between drifting and Danish seining or long-lining was more able to appreciate the operations of Norwegian and Danish boats fishing in the North Sea. They were using

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Figure 5.4: Catch per unit of effort (tonnes per day at sea) in the Scottish West Coast herring fishery by fishing method, 1966–1977. Source: Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland, Scottish sea fisheries statistical tables (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1967–1978).

synthetic fibre nets and electronic aides, and read about advances in fishing outlined in the Fishing News and World Fishing, both advocates of modernity. There was no simple transfer between research and development undertaken by the Board and White Fish Authority and innovation by fishermen; innovation is a complex process. But a persistent propagation and testing of ideas and equipment correlated with the experience of fishing alongside more productive foreign boats and the pull of demand to create the almost perfect preconditions for change. For the Board these developments validated a belief held since the 1940s that more productive fishing methods were essential for the industry’s long-term future. The approach of the Board and the White Fish Authority was congruent with both the general direction of post-war British technology policy through to the “golden age” of growth and the optimistic vision of technological progress presented to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation International Fishing Boat Congresses of the 1950s and 1960s.42 The Board’s post-war research programme was aligned with the vision outlined in the 1965 National Plan, increasing output and productivity

42 Traung, Fishing Boats of the World, volumes 1–3.

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through investment in new capacity.43 While the Board’s operations were subject to a degree of uncomfortable commentary from Sir Alexander Fleck Committee, his report accepted that there were few grounds on which to criticise its research effort.44 Tunstall’s complaints about fishing’s backwardness were not without cause, but were not obviously borne out by comparing the National Plan’s assessment of fishing alongside similar reports for agriculture, forestry, and food processing. The National Plan reaffirmed the government commitment to fleet modernisation manifest in post-war investment grants and loans, concluding that “the industry rightly sees technological development as the principal means of combating competition.”45 Adoption of trawling and purse seining, it seemed, could not be more timely. The upswing in productivity arising from the adoption of new fishing methods underpinned the revival of catches evident in Figure 5.1. It also rejuvenated certain herring trades. As Figure 5.1 also shows, higher landings stimulated production of meal and oil, at least in the short term. Rising production gave fresh impetus to “klondyking” – exporting fresh herring to foreign markets.46 The Fish Trades Gazette noted a revival of the trade in 1962 as German and Dutch vessels shuttled fish across the North Sea.47 Scottish merchants organized similar shipments from 1963 and the average quantity of herring taken for reduction over the 1960s grew by approximately 15 percent per annum, albeit from a low base. In 1969, klondyking was absorbing about one-sixth of landings. Astonishingly, nearly one-quarter of shipments in 1969 went to Norway, the dominant herring fishing economy.48 Klondyking in the 1960s can been seen as a regional response to overfishing, a flow of resources from relatively underexploited west coast fisheries to compensate for the decreasing supplies from the North Sea. Over the course of the 1960s, reduction was the marginally more important mechanism for disposing of herring catches, but klondyking became the more important outlet through the 1970s as shortages intensified in Europe.

43 BPP, The National Plan (London, 1965), 1114–1117. 44 BPP, Committee of Inquiry into the Fishing Industry, 136. 45 BPP, National Plan, 1116. 46 “Klondyking” has come to refer to bulk transhipments of fish at sea to foreign factory ships. This was not a major factor in the herring trade in the 1960s and 1970s. Originally the term referred to the earnings from landing directly at mainland Europe markets direct from the North Sea, a practice that took its name from the famous gold rush. 47 Fish Trades Gazette, December 22, 1962. The Board had promoted boxing at sea immediately after the war and provided financial assistance to help crews purchase boxes. Taylor devoted an entire chapter to the fishing industry’s “box problem” (Taylor, Economics of White Fish Distribution, 169–175). 48 HIB, Thirty-fifth Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1969, 21.

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New fishing methods did not arrive without reservations. British herring fishers had a longstanding antipathy towards trawling and its perceived impact on stocks. The Board also had reservations about promoting new technologies. Changes in the fisheries were clearly evident from landings statistics, especially those for East Anglian ports. And it had a detailed understanding of regional trends. But its stance towards new methods was complicated by uncertainty about the causes and permanence of the changes in the North Sea fisheries. Assumptions that herring were not threatened by overfishing remained through to the late 1940s. Herring trawling was excluded from gear regulations and the fish size limits agreed at the 1946 International Overfishing Conference,49 and overfishing was not a primary concern when ICES established its Herring Committee in 1949. Opinion had changed a decade later when the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Convention was signed in 1959. Fisheries management was still an infant industry, decades away from developing a comprehensive risk assessment policy. For fisheries development organizations such as the Board, problems affecting policy development identified previously – imperfect information, uncertainty about the consequences of overfishing, and concern for the political ramifications of unilateral conservation – all affected the capacity to design and implement policy for the long term. Science continues to learn from the experience of the North East Atlantic herring stocks between the 1950s and 1980s. But there is broad agreement about how overfishing precipitated their depletion.50 There was no similar consensus in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scientists attempted to weigh the relative contributions of environment against overfishing without establishing a policy-ready view. The 1959 Convention gave the Board a reference point on the overfishing problem, and its reports show that it regarded the overfishing problem seriously. But while it attempted to reconcile its development goals with scientific opinion the Board was first and foremost an industry body, more intimately connected to the daily operation of the trades at ports and trade associations than Whitehall. Stocks were not the only concern in the early 1960s; Britain’s membership of the European Free Trade Association, the balance of payments, and the extension of fisheries limits were all matters of concern. But it reached its own accommodation between the cases for conservation and innovation by 1961. While noting that the overfishing thesis had been gaining credence, the Board explained the rationale for planned experimental trawling. If

49 BPP, Final Act and Convention of the International Overfishing Conference, London, 25 March-5 April 1946. 50 Simmonds, “Comparison of Two Periods of North Sea Herring Stock Management,” 686–692; Dickey-Collas, “Lessons Learned,” 1875–1886.

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trawling was more efficient but not detrimental to stocks, then British boats ought to be encouraged to take up the method forthwith. Conversely, “if, on the other hand, trawling for herring is harmful, we, in this country, are likely to be no worse off by joining others who fish in this manner and taking all we can get while the going’s good.”51 And if trawling were harmful, then the additional pressure on resources would serve to intensify efforts to conserve stocks. Subsequent reports presented more nuanced judgments, and the Board strongly supported attempts to orchestrate the international management of herring stocks. With this extraordinary statement, inconceivable in the age of risk-based management, the Board sided with development over conservation and the prevailing industry constituency. Optimism regarding the capacity of scientists and emerging institutions to command and control stocks was ultimately misplaced. The Board’s development bias was consistent with mainstream approaches to science, technology, and economics. Governments across the North Atlantic and beyond pump-primed their fisheries to increase demand and raise productivity. The Board articulated the confidence in technology articulated in the National Plan, and Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech on the imminent technological revolution. The Board was fully invested in the vision of modernity presented in the International Fishing Boat Congress proceedings and the trade press. The Board’s objectives – the release of labour, the increase in efficiency, and a reduction in balance of payments pressures – were indistinguishable from those set out in the National Plan. But fishing is different from most industries through the cumulative effects of stock, congestion, and gear externalities. A treadmill effect was manifest in fisheries across the region as countries sought to combat Graham’s “Michael Graham” through new technology with exactly the “sardonic effects” he had predicted.52 The OECD noted that while potential productivity increased by 40 percent across the North Atlantic between 1957 and 1965, actual production only increased by 20 percent.53 Separately, the OECD also noted in the mid-1960s that subsidies for herring fishing in some countries could be as high as 14–20 percent of the value of the catch.54 As with many aspects of the post-war “golden age” of economic growth, a reckoning awaited the region’s fishing industries in the 1970s.

51 52 53 54

HIB, Twenty-seventh Annual Report 1961, 4. Graham, Fish Gate, 152–155. OECD, Fishery Policies and Economics 1957–1966, 18. OECD, Financial Support to the Fishing Industry, 14.

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Conclusion Robinson and Starkey, reviewing British fisheries history at the end of the last century, suggest ways the research agenda might evolve without attempting to be exhaustive in their recommendations.55 Institutions and policy were not foremost in their thoughts. But this chapter, and Wilcox’s recent paper on the post-war circumstances leading to the establishment of the White Fish Authority, support the view that the changes in organization initiated in the 1930s had a profound influence on the structure, conduct, and performance of Britain’s fisheries through to the age of management in the 1980s.56 Speaking to the 1950 herring utilisation meeting in Bergen, Gerhardsen suggested that integration between primary production, processing, and distribution that he observed across herring fishing nations was an “outstanding feature” of post-war growth.57 Across the North East Atlantic the visible hands of governments or their delegates facilitated and guided this integration and the intensification of effort that it propagated, and a greater appreciation of the internal logic of development policy is another important piece in the overfishing jigsaw. The Herring Industry Board was born out of deep economic and social distress. While its understanding of the industry’s problems evolved with circumstances, it remained faithful to the productivist goal of realising the best use of the greatest efficient yield that could be reasonably obtained from the fishery. Operating outside to the established institutions of fisheries science, the Board was a conventional development agency that pursued an orthodox approach to policy formation largely contained within a closely defined sphere of influence. Its policy of encouraging a overproduction relative to the level of demand from traditional herring processors and channels of distribution, and creating a secondary market for fishmeal and oil with a bias to increase production, was a less powerful influence on the overfishing in the region than the overt industrial fisheries developed in Denmark and Norway. Its promotion on more intensive fishing methods such as trawling for herring trailed behind the use of the trawl by other countries such as Germany. But its efforts were nonetheless a contributing factor in what arguably remains Britain’s most powerful experience of the overfishing problem. As happened across the region, the Board channelled what were by any standard considerable sums of public money into the process of modernisation. It saw fishing, processing, and marketing as integrated elements of

55 Robinson and Starkey, “Sea Fisheries of the British Isles,” 141. 56 Wilcox, “‘To Save the Industry.’” 57 Gerhardsen, “Herring Marketing Situation,” 60.

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an industry, all requiring organisational and technical solutions if the overall goal of development was to be achieved and each stage of the supply chain capable of engendering change upstream or downstream. The 1970s were a turbulent decade for British industry. The collapse of herring fishing in the periphery could not compete with the televised “cod wars,” let alone iconic business failures, such as the motorcycle industry. While there would be no repeat of the inquiries of the 1920s and 1930s that had set in train the pathway of development pursued by the Board, hard lessons were learned. Yet in certain respects the development bias in policy continued even immediately after events. Looking to the future, the Expenditure Committee’s 1978 report recommended assistance to address hardship, support to investigate the potential for fishing underexploited species such as blue whiting, and research programs to help fishers adopt new fishing methods, such as Norwegian long-lining.58 It would appear that while the Herring Industry Board became redundant, features of its doctrine of the maximum utilization of maximum production would live on.

Bibliography Bailey, Connor, and Svein Jentoft. “Hard Choices in Fisheries Development,” Marine Policy 14 (1990): 333–344. Berton-Charrière, Danièle. “The Silver Darlings: An Emblem of the Scottish Sea and History.” Études Écossaises 19 (2017). http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/1175. BPP. Food Council Report on Fish Prices. London, 1927. BPP. Imperial Economic Committee Report on Marketing and Preparation for Market of Foodstuffs Produced within the Empire: Fifth Report – Fish. London, 1927. BPP. Report of the Economic Advisory Council Committee on the Fishing Industry. London, 1932. BPP. Sea Fish Commission for the United Kingdom: First Report, The Herring Industry. London, 1934. BPP. Sea Fish Commission for the United Kingdom: Second Report, The White Fish Industry. London, 1936. BPP. Report of the Scottish Home Department Committee on the Herring Industry. Edinburgh, 1944. BPP. Final Act and Convention of the International Overfishing Conference London, 25 March5 April 1946. London, 1948. BPP. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Fishing Industry [Fleck Committee]. London, 1961. BPP. The National Plan. London, 1965.

58 BPP, Fifth Report from the Expenditure Committee: The Fishing Industry, Volume 1, 89–90.

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BPP, Fifth Report from the Expenditure Committee: The Fishing Industry Volume 1. London, 1978. Burd, A. C. “Long Term Changes in North Sea Herring Stocks,” ICES Rapports et ProcésVerbaux des Réunions 172 (1975): 137–153. Campbell, Brooke, and Jackie Alder. “Fishmeal and Fish Oil: Production, Trade and Consumption.” In On the Multiple Uses of Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets, edited by Jackie Alder, and Daniel Pauly, 47–66. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2006. Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway. Historical Statistics 1978. Oslo: Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway, 1978. Cooper, Andrew F. British Agricultural Policy, 1912–36: A Study in Conservative Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Coull, James R. “The Scottish Herring Fishery in the Inter-war years, 1919–1939: Ordeal and Retrenchment.” International Journal of Maritime History 2 (1990): 55–81 Dickey-Collas, Mark, R. D. M. Nash, T. Brunel, C. J. G. van Damme, C. T. Marshall, M. R. Payne, A. Corten, A. J. Geffen, M. A. Peck, E. M. C. Hatfield, N. T. Hintzen, K. Enberg, L. T. Kell, E. J. Simmonds et al., “Lessons Learned from Stock Collapse and Recovery of North Sea Herring: A Review.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 67 (2010): 1875–1886. FAO, Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics 1947. Washington D.C.: FAO, 1948. Gerhardsen, Gerhard M. “The Herring Marketing Situation.” In The Technology of Herring Utilisation: Report of the FAO Meeting on Herring Technology, edited by Morgens Jul, and Morgens Kondrup, 55–92. Bergen, FAO, 1953. Graham, Michael. The Fish Gate. London: Faber and Faber, 1943. HIB. First Annual Report for the period ending 31 March 1936. London: HMSO. HIB. Second Annual Report for the year ending 31 March 1937. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1937. HIB. Eleventh Annual Report for the year ending 31 March 1946. London: HMSO, 1946. HIB. Fourteenth Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 1949 (London: HMSO, 1949): 42. HIB. Twenty-seventh Annual Report for the year ended 1961. London: HMSO, 1962. HIB. Thirty-first annual report for the year ended 31 December 1965 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1966). HIB. Thirty-third Annual Report for year ended 31 December 1967. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1968. HIB. Thirty-fifth Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1969. Edinburgh, HMSO, 1970. Holm, Poul.“World War II and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of North Atlantic Fisheries.” Global Environment 5 (2012): 66–91. Hubbard, Jennifer. “Changing Regimes: Governments, Scientists and Fishermen and the Construction of Fisheries Policies in the North Atlantic, 1850–2010.” In A History of the North Altlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twenty-first Century, edited by David J. Starkey, and Ingo Heidbrink, 129–176. Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, 2012. OECD. Financial Support to the Fishing Industry. Paris: OECD, 1965. OECD. Fishery Policies and Economics 1957–1966. Paris: OECD, 1966. OEEC. Fishery Policies in Western Europe and North America. Paris: OEEC, 1960. Reid, Chris. “Managing Innovation in the British Herring Fishery: The Role of the Herring Industry Board 1945–77.” Marine Policy 22 (1998): 281–295. Reid, Chris. “Britain’s Most Antiquated Industry: Mr Tunstall and the Fishing Industry.” International Journal of Maritime History 22 (2010): 171–197. Rieser, Alison. “The Herring Enlightenment: Adam Smith and the Reform of British Fishing Subsidies, 1783–1799.” International Journal of Maritime History 29 (2017): 600–619.

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Robinson, Robb. Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996. Robinson, Robb, and David J. Starkey, “The Sea Fisheries of the British Isles, 1376–1976: A Preliminary Survey.” In The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100–1976: National Perspectives on a Common Resource, edited by Poul Holm, David J. Starkey, and Jón Th Thór, 121–144. Esbjerg: Fiskeri-og Søfartsmuseet, 1996. Roemer, Michael, Fishing for Growth: Export-led Development in Peru, 1950–1967. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Simmonds, E. John, “Comparison of Two Periods of North Sea Herring Stock Management: Success, Failure, and Monetary Value.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 64 (2007): 686–692. Taylor, Richard A. The Economics of White Fish Distribution in Great Britain. London: Duckworth, 1960. Traung, Jan-Olof. Fishing Boats of the World. London: Fishing News Books, 1955. Traung, Jan-Olof. Fishing Boats of the World, Volume 2. London: Fishing News Books, 1960. Traung, Jan-Olof. Fishing Boats of the World, Volume 3. London: Fishing News Books, 1967. Tunstall, Jeremy, “Fish: An Antiquated Industry.” Fabian Tract 380 (1968). Underdal, Arild. The Politics of International Fisheries Management: The case of the Northeast Atlantic. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980. WFA, Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 1960. London: HMSO, 1960. Wilcox, Martin, “‘To Save the Industry from Complete Ruin’: Crisis and Response in British Fishing 1945–1951.” Business History (2019). DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2019.1576634. World Bank, The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform. Washington D.C.: World Bank, 2008.

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6 April 18, 1989: The Acceptance of Overfishing in Norway Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Matthew 7:3

In June 1976, the chairman of the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association (NFA), Johan J. Toft, claimed in a speech that Norwegian fishers had achieved an important victory. In the international negotiations on fishery regulations in the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), Norway had secured an exemption for the coastal fishery. Even after the annual TAC had been taken, the Norwegian coastal fleet would be allowed to continue fishing with conventional gear, since, as the quote on the front page of the fisheries newspaper claimed: “Conventional gear pose no threat to the fish stocks.”1 This was wrong. According to the principal Norwegian expert on cod assessment and the director of the Institute of Marine Research (IMR): “A dead cod is a dead cod, regardless of what kind of gear it has been caught with.”2 Nevertheless, Toft’s argument not only reflected a deeply held conviction among coastal fishers, but was also the position taken by Norwegian negotiators in NEAFC. As a fisheries nation, Norway defined its position in line with the interest of small-scale coastal fisheries, using conventional, passive gear. The threat of overfishing came primarily from the expanding international trawler fleets, not coastal fishing. However, with the new oceans regime that would soon be implemented, the rules of the game were about to change. Once the Norwegian state was firmly in charge of fisheries management within a 200-mile zone, pointing to foreign trawlers as the root cause of overfishing could no longer justify the privileged treatment of the coastal fleet. Still, it took some time for that to sink in. The major turning point came in 1989, 13 years after the NFA leader had celebrated the exoneration of the coastal fleet. In that year, the quota share allocated to the coastal fleet was made binding for the first time. The implication, which came as a shock to the coastal fishers when it took effect on April 18, was that the coastal fleet was obliged to stay in harbor because there was no quota left.

1 Fiskeribladet, June 18, 1976. 2 Fiskeribladet, April 20, 1989. Nakken was quoted by Viggo Jan Olsen, the Director of Fisheries. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-007

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This chapter is about a major turning point in the history of Norwegian fisheries. At this exact date, April 18 1989, the reality of overfishing was accepted and made binding for the coastal cod fishery. Since this fishery also was the political and cultural heart of Norwegian fisheries, in practice this date signaled a regime shift for the whole sector. This does not mean that overfishing had been completely neglected before that. Important events had prepared the ground for the decision to enforce a hard quota in 1989, like the herring collapse in 1969 and the establishment of a 200-mile EEZ in 1977. Nor does it mean that the transformation itself was accomplished quickly, with swift acceptance of a new order ruled by concerns for environmental sustainability. Instead, the realization of a new order of things unfolded slowly, with an extended series of painful negotiation points, amidst an acute sense of crisis and loss of important values. This is a key lesson from our story. While overfishing is easy to understand as a concept, the governance mechanisms required to accept and manage it in an effective and legitimate way are complex, multi-dimensional, and slow to build. Our story of April 18 comes in four parts. First, we describe what happened that day and how it was perceived. In the second part, we lay the ground for explaining this, reaching back to the institutional work by which the coastal fisher – presumed to be incapable of overfishing – had been celebrated and institutionalized in Norwegian fisheries through the previous 100 years. In part three, we show how the demise of this image of the coastal fisher in 1989, shocking as it was, had nevertheless been in the making for a long time, with the new oceans regime introduced in 1977 serving as the invisible doomsday machine. In the final part, we describe how the hard-earned protective shields around the coastal fisher crumbled as the newfound resolve to prevent overfishing led to a major institutional reconstruction of Norwegian fisheries.

The Shock The Lofoten fishery is the oldest commercial fishery in Norway.3 The season traditionally lasts from January to the end of April, with the Northeast Arctic cod, migrating from the Barents Sea to the waters around the Lofoten Islands to spawn, the main target.4 As a commercial and export-orientated fishery, Lofoten’s history dates back more than a thousand years,5 during which time it

3 Nielssen, “Seal Hunters and Early Fishermen.” 4 Hylen, Nakken and Nedreaas, “Northeast Arctic Cod.” 5 Nielssen, “Seal Hunters and Early Fishermen.”

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has been the largest and most important fishery in Norway. The main markets for dried cod from Lofoten were the growing urban centers of the European continent in the Middle Ages. The cod export connected Norway to the continental market economy at a time when most of its production was orientated towards self-sufficiency and domestic consumption. In Northern Norway, the Lofoten fishery has always had a strong cultural and symbolic significance.6 The prospect for the 1989 cod fishery was very promising. IMR had predicted larger catches in the Lofoten fishery than for many years.7 The reason was that the very strong 1983 year-class now was mature and on its way from the Barents Sea. The prediction came true. Throughout the winter, there was an exceptionally rich cod fishery all the way from western Finnmark to Lofoten.8 In addition, the market conditions were favorable. After a long period with dismal economic results, casting shadows along the coast, things were finally turning up. And then, dramatically, they turned down. For 1989, the total quota (TAC) for cod in the Barents Sea was 340,000 tons. Since 1976, Norway and the Soviet Union had managed the fishery resources, of which the Northeast Arctic cod was the largest and most valuable stock. The Norwegian share of the cod quota was 178,000 tons, split between trawlers (65,000 tons) and the coastal fleet (113,000 tons). Because of the good catching conditions, the total landings accumulated quickly. In mid-April, well before the traditional end of the Lofoten fishery, the Fisheries Directorate calculated that the quota allocated to the coastal fleet was about to be filled.9 On April 18, 1989, the Ministry decided the quota was caught and stopped the coastal fishery. The justification was simply the fact that the cod quota was finished. In hindsight, evaluated by the principles of sound environmental governance, the decision in 1989 does not appear to have been particularly unexpected or problematic. When a quota has been caught, fishing stops. At the time, however, this was not accepted as the normal order of things in the Norwegian fisheries. The extraordinary aspects of this are already hinted at by the fact that the fish stop was not a routine issue, already presumed as part of the quota implementation system. Instead, it was deemed to be a highly controversial decision, and was hence taken explicitly by the Ministry, with active involvement by the Minister himself.10

6 Kolle, Fish, Coast and Communities. 7 Verdens Gang, January 2, 1989. 8 Nordlys, April 6, 1989. 9 Holm, “Aldri mer 18. april,” 186. 10 Finstad, “Fiskeriministeren.”

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The fish stop was “a shock that calls for deep reflection.”11 One reason for that, as indicated above, was that it had never happened before. Access to the fisheries had always been open to coastal vessels. While some gear restrictions and shorter periodic closures had been imposed in previous years, a complete stop was unprecedented. In practical terms, it meant that a number of fishers – particularly those relying on smaller vessels – had only just started their season. In more principled terms, the fish stop was seen as a challenge to the open fisheries commons, by which access to fishing was seen as an inherent right for the coastal people. Adding strength to the feeling of crisis was the fact that the coastal fleet had previously been exempted from the quota regulations, since the fishery with passive gear arguably did not pose a threat to the cod stock.12 Relying on passive gear, the coastal fleet simply did not have the technical capacity to overexploit the resources. This was not simply a local theory, invoked to justify the preferential treatment of the coastal fleet. On the contrary, as indicated in the introduction, it had until recently been accepted as the basis of Norwegian fishery policy, a cornerstone for the Norwegian position in international fisheries negotiations. The exemption of coastal fisheries in the quota agreement in NEAFC, celebrated by the NFA chairman in 1976, had confirmed and authorized the postulate that coastal fishers were blameless in the case of overfishing. In the same year, a clause to the same effect was included in the bilateral agreement between Norway and the Soviet Union over the management of the Barents Sea fisheries. Here, it remained in force until 1984, when it was replaced by a formulation that hinted of a less lenient practice. “The fishing with nets, longline and handline should be limited by both parties, under due consideration of the established quotas and the stock situation. The parties will implement regulations aimed at achieving such limitations.”13 Nevertheless, the practice of allowing the coastal fleet to fish in excess of the quota still continued in the following two years. From 1986 to 1988, the conditions on the fishing grounds were unfavorable, and the fleet did not manage to take the allocated quota. In the 1989 season, combining excellent fishing conditions with a very small quota, the fishers fully expected that the established practice of quota overfishing would still apply. They were wrong, and they felt wronged. The exemption of the coastal fleet from the quota regulations was not without scientific backing. The historian Vera Schwach has argued that “[f]ishing

11 Fiskeribladet, April 18, 1989. 12 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april,” 188. 13 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.” Author’s translation.

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resources were thought of as inexhaustible in Norway until the collapse of the herring stock in 1969.”14 The dominant approach at IMR, building on Johan Hjort’s pioneering work, was that the natural variation in the strength in yearclasses were much more important than the impact of fishing.15 In the case of herring, this theory was championed by IMR’s top expert, Finn Devold, right through the stock collapse.16 In the case of cod, similar notions were in play. Because of the great number of eggs produced by a single female cod, there was little danger that exploitation of the spawning stock would cause recruitment failure and weak year-classes. To the extent overfishing was a problem in the cod fishery, this was primarily caused by the expansion of the trawler fishery in the Barents Sea, exploiting the immature cod.17 In Norway, then, science had sided with the coastal fishers, pointing to the trawlers – foreign or Norwegian – as the root cause of the problem. Here, fisher knowledge and science went hand in hand. In a portrait interview published in March 1989, an influential voice for the coastal fishers, Steinar Friis, dramatized the scientific narrative: “You get infuriated! They take them too small at the ice edge. That is what is so terribly wrong. The cod don’t live long enough to mature and is prevented from spawning. Outright plunder is what is going on in the Barents Sea.”18

Re-enacting the Trollfjord Battle The Grand Narrative in Norwegian fisheries is the historical construction of the class conflict between poor, but independent, small-scale fishers and the common coastal people on the one hand, and fish merchants, capital owners, and industrialists on the other. The Trollfjord Battle of March 1890 is one of the historical episodes that constitute this narrative.19 What actually happened in Trollfjorden in 1890 is not entirely clear.20 That is also less important, since the significance of the story lies in the way it has justified interventions and institutional forms that came later. In essence, the episode was a clash between the commoners and the capitalists; the fleet of traditional open vessels against the

14 Schwach, “Sea Around Norway,” 101. 15 Schwach, Havet, fisken og vitenskapen. 16 Christensen, “Under a New Management Regime.” 17 Hylen, Nakken and Nedreaas, “Northeast Arctic Cod,” 97, 103–107. 18 Aftenposten. A-magasinet, March 11, 1989. 19 Other episodes include the Mehamn incident in 1903 (Johansen, “Motstand”) and the fishers’ boycott in Vardø in 1937 (Christensen and Hallenstvedt, På første hånd). 20 Posti, Trollfjordslaget; Johansen, “Motstand.”

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modern large-scale steamer. The incident began when a huge volume of spawning cod was discovered in the narrow Trollfjord. A large number of the fishers headed for the fjord. However, at the mouth of the fjord, a couple of steamers – owned by a merchant capitalist in the region – had already anchored, using a seine to lock in the cod. The steamer captains claimed to have caught the fish in the fjord, and therefore demanded payment from the fishers who wished to enter. In the traditional rendering of the event, the capitalist had breached the principles and practice of the commons, by which the right to fish was held by the coastal fishers. Hence, they ignored the steamer captains’ claim, passed the makeshift barrier, and started to fish. There may have been a fist-fight or two. No-one died and there were no reports of injuries. Despite the absence of spilled blood, the sound of the Trollfjord battle echoed through the next 100 years of Norwegian fishery policy and beyond. Its impact started immediately when the government, accepting the chorus of complaints from thousands of small-scale fishers, proposed to ban the use of seine in Lofoten. The Parliament subsequently passed this as part of the Lofoten Act in 1894. This was the first in a long line of acts and regulations over the next decades that revolved around a main theme: to protect the small-scale fisheries as the economic basis for coastal communities and culture. To the extent modernization was an issue, it should be achieved by developing this structure, not through industrial technology and capitalist takeover. The trawling issue is a case in point. From the early 1900s, international trawling activity expanded from the North Sea to the Barents Sea.21 In addition to British and Scottish trawlers, German and French steamers headed northwards in the struggle to capture the Northeast Arctic cod.22 Norway did not participate in this development, in part because it was not needed to catch the fish – the coastal fleet did that – and also because the coastal fishers actively resisted. Sometimes, foreign trawlers appeared on fishing grounds used by Norwegian fishers, even in the fjords.23 This provoked the Norwegian fishers, and led to a campaign against the foreign trawlers. Accepting the fishers’ concerns, Norway declared a new fishery border in 1906, excluding foreign vessels from fishing closer than four nautical miles from the coastline.24 Two years later, the Trawler Act was adopted, banning trawl fishing within Norwegian territorial waters.25 In

21 Iversen, Trålfiskets historie; Robinson, Trawling; Heidbrink, Beckmann and Keller, Und heute gibt es Fisch; Heidbrink, “Beyond the North Sea.” 22 Robinson, Trawling. 23 Christensen, “En havenes forpester.” 24 Harsson and Preiss, “Norwegian Baselines.” 25 Harsson and Preiss, “Norwegian Baselines.”

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1939, a new and even more restrictive act against trawling was passed.26 This act included severe restrictions on the activities of trawlers owned by Norwegians. Again and again, Norwegian authorities accommodated the demands of the coastal fishers, protecting their turf from trawler intrusion. The trawler acts sought to protect the coastal fisher from competition on the fishing grounds. During the economic depression of the 1930s, however, weak fish prices and cut-throat competition represented the greatest threat to the fishers.27 A number of measures were introduced to shield the Norwegian part of the value chain from the consequences of withdrawing from international fish markets. The result was a corporative system, with monopolies and other protectionist measures that included fishers and processors, as well as exporters.28 The Raw Fish Act of 1938, the most important of these acts, established legal monopolies to organizations owned by fishers in the first-hand trade in fish.29 The extent to which the act actually helped stabilize fish markets is an open question. The Second World War started before the sales organizations were up and running, and the market dynamics changed after that. What is clear, however, is the act’s strong, symbolic and economic significance for the coastal fishers. It gave the fishers a real, collective bargaining position against the fish merchants, towards whom they had traditionally deferred and been forced into servitude. At the same time, the sales organizations served as an income basis for the NFA, establishing the association as powerful actor working to secure the coastal fishers’ interests. In economic terms, the organization of the markets also stabilized fish prices, allowing for long term planning and investment in larger vessels.30 Our final example of government intervention in support of the coastal fishers is the framework for the negotiation of fisheries subsidies, established by the so-called Main Agreement for the fisheries in 1963. The background for this was a steady decline in the economic performance of the sector during the post-war years, especially from the late 1950s. The agreement opened up for state subsidies if the total sector income was not sufficient to keep up a reasonable average income level. Whereas the Agreement in principle included the whole sector, it was negotiated between government and the NFA. The argument was that the fishers’ association was the only organized group that was broad and strong

26 Harsson and Preiss, “Norwegian Baselines.” 27 Jentoft and Finstad, “Building Fisheries Institutions”; Hersoug, Finstad and Christensen, “A System of Norwegian Fish Sales Unions.” 28 Holm, “Kan torsken temmes?” 29 Holm, “Kan torsken temmes?” 30 Holm, “Særinteresser versus allmenningsinteresser.”

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enough to represent the whole sector. This privileged position of negotiating the amount and distribution of state subsidies on behalf of the sector also allowed the NFA to become broader and stronger.31 While the Agreement encompassed the whole sector, it was made operational by reference to the fisher’s income level. From 1964, the annual negotiations under the Main Agreement resulted in substantial subsidies to the sector. During the period from 1964 to 1990, the subsidies amounted to 19 percent of the value of the Norwegian fish catches.32 The Main Agreement and the subsidy system had several purposes and affected the fisheries sector in different ways.33 We include it here primarily because it established, in combination with the Raw Fish Act, a benign economic framework for the coastal fleet. The most important subsidy mechanisms in the Agreement were fish price support and cost reduction measures. While this benefited large-scale as well as small-scale operators, it was particularly important in creating stable prices and economic predictability for the coastal fleet, which lay exposed to severe fluctuations and uncertainty. Whereas this served as protection for the traditional structure in the fisheries, and a continuation of coastal fishing as a basis for the coastal communities and culture, it also contained the seeds for the modernization of the coastal fleet.34 As the foregoing examples show, the Norwegian authorities over the years have been responsive to the struggles of the small-scale fishers and the coastal communities. With the Trawler Act, the Raw Fish Act, and the Main Agreement, an institutional system for protecting the interests of the coastal fishers was created. We could have included other examples, like the Ownership Act, by which the right to own fishing vessels was reserved for active fishers,35 or the battle over industrialization of the processing industry, which did open up for limited trawler expansion, but at the same consolidated the coastal fisher dominance.36 We could have recounted the history of the expansion of the maritime domain, where the Norwegian battle for extended fisheries jurisdiction was justified with reference to the dependence of coastal communities on the traditional fisheries.37

31 Kolle, “Staten og lønnsomhetsproblemet.” 32 Holm, “Kan torsken temmes?” 33 Jentoft and Mikalsen, “Government Subsidies”; Holm, “Særinteresser versus allmenning sinteresser.” 34 Jentoft and Mikalsen, “Government Subsidies.” 35 Kolle, “Strid om veivalg.” 36 Finstad, Henriksen and Holm, “Fra krise til krise.” 37 Kolle and Christensen, “Disputing Maritime Domains.”

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While more detail could easily be added, the common theme is clear, and effectively captured by the myth of Trollfjord battle. This is about the smallscale fisher against the expansive capitalist, traditional community against destructive competition; a way of life against rationalist overexploitation. During the 99 years between the events in Trollfjorden and the closure of the fisheries commons on April 18, 1989, the coastal fishers had petitioned to – and to an extraordinary degree been accommodated by – the authorities. The path towards the modernization of Norwegian fisheries and coastal society had not been industrialization and capitalist enterprise, but was built on the traditional structures and legitimized with reference to the coastal fisher and the open commons, embedded in a basis for coastal communities, shielded from capitalist intrusion through a sophisticated system of interlocking institutions.

Silently Shifting Shape April 18, 1989 came as a shock. We can now understand why. Not only was the fish stop unprecedented, abruptly cancelling the earlier exemption for the coastal fleet from the quota regulation, but it also defied the traditional scientific justification for the preferential treatment of the coastal fleet. As indicated in the previous section, it broke with the expectation of the coastal fishers, grounded in century-long experience, that the authorities would be on their side. In the new reality now taking shape, the old rules no longer applied. The Trollfjord battle no longer worked as a metaphor to make sense of the situation, nor could it serve as roadmap towards a resolution. With hindsight, of course, it is easy to identify the precursors for this shift. One important assemblage of factors can be summarized under the heading of “modernization.” During the twentieth century, the coastal fisheries were transformed in economic, technological, and political terms. In 1939, there were 124,000 Norwegian fishers, the majority of whom combined income from fishing with their earnings from agriculture and other activities. Some 50 years later, the number had dropped to 28,000, of whom only 7,000 were part-timers.38 The path towards modernization, based on the Trawler Act, the Raw Fish Act, and the Main Agreement, had worked wonders by turning the backward fisher-peasant into an effective and technologically sophisticated professional fisher. The institutional framework constructed to serve and protect the coastal fishers had also transformed them. At the same time, of course, the economic modernization of the

38 SSB 1990.

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Norwegian economy had changed the coastal communities. Where fishing earlier had been part of most families’ economic basis, it had been gradually replaced by other occupations and had lost its dominant position.39 The change in the coastal fleet’s structure and technological sophistication also implied that its capacity for impacting the resources had changed. The heroes of the Trollfjord battle, using hand lines or nets from open vessels, could hardly make a dent in the cod stock, regardless of their number. A fleet of modern coastal vessels could do so, however, as was demonstrated during the period the coastal fleet was exempt from quota regulation. From 1977 to 1984, the Norwegian catch was nearly 500,000 tons in excess of the quota, representing an overfishing rate of 25 percent. During this period, the trawler fleet had kept within its quota, with all the excessive catch being caught by passive gear.40 During the same period, the science of stock assessment and advice shifted. Whereas the traditional scientific position – the legacy of Hjort – had largely absolved the coastal fishers from the curse of overfishing, this was challenged and eventually abandoned. During the late 1960s, ICES recognized that the size of the spawning stock biomass affected recruitment and yearclass strength.41 Towards the end of the 1990s, this was fully accepted and was embedded in the modern precautionary approach to quota advice, in which indicators for fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass are combined in the assessment.42 Already in 1989, however, this scientific approach formed the basis of advice for the Barents Sea cod. Hence, “a dead cod is a dead cod regardless of the gear it was caught with,” in Nakken’s words. While the coastal fishers were still clinging to the old scientific lore of Hjort, the current scientific position of IMR and ICES could no longer justify preferential treatment for the coastal fleet. And then there was the new oceans regime, established in the late 1970s through 200-mile EEZs and codified in 1982 by UNCLOS. In this regime, the coastal state had a right to utilize, and a responsibility for sustainable management of, the fisheries resources. In order to understand the decision to close the coastal fishery in 1989, the new regime has to be taken into account. With control over, and responsibility for, half of the cod stock, it no longer made sense in economic and environmental terms to allow the coastal fleet’s quota overfishing to continue. While the direct justification for shutting it down was the increase in protests from the Soviet Union, this cannot have been a difficult 39 Christensen, “New Coastal Society.” 40 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april,” 188. 41 Hylen, Nakken and Nedreaas, Northeast Arctic Cod, 107. 42 Lassen, Kelly and Sissenwine, “ICES Advisory Framework 1977–2012”.

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concession. Since overfishing the quota would affect the future size of the Norwegian quota, a continuation of this practice was clearly not in the national interest. Within the new regime, the interest of the coastal fleet was no longer identical to that of the coastal fishers. Modernization, revised scientific models, and a new oceans regime silently conspired, leading up to that notorious day in April 1989. Nevertheless, the established institutional network, justified with reference to the coastal fisher and the Trollfjord battle, was not ready to accept this. To understand the political and moral courage it took for the Minister to go through with it, we refer to an episode ten years earlier. The episode features Bjørn Brochmann, a fisheries economist and bureaucrat in the Ministry of Fisheries. In a series of public talks along the coast, he forcefully argued that the terms of Main Agreement, with fisheries subsides dominated by price support and cost reduction, under the terms of the new oceans regime, were highly irrational and self-defeating. Without checks on capacity development, the subsidies would simply be translated to increasing cost. Instead of improving effectiveness and income for the fisheries, as intended, the subsidies would create overcapacity over time, induce overfishing, and lock in the sector’s subsidy dependence. Under these terms, Brochmann argued, the fishers would contribute more to the common good by idling at home, enjoying the sun, than by active fishing.43 Brochmann, who based these claims in standard resource economic theory, was entirely correct. Under the new oceans regime, the fisheries subsidies had been made counterproductive. For the fishers and their organization, however, Brochmann’s analysis was completely unacceptable. Building on an institutional image of the fisheries as the economic basis for coastal communities and culture, his message was hard to accept, and it was met with a barrage of disbelief, indignation, and ridicule. At the time, in 1980–81, the coastal fishers still enjoyed a privileged position, exempt from quota regulations. The fisheries commons and the principle of open access remained self-evident pillars of the established order. If anything, the 200-mile EEZ seemed to promise further consolidation of this order, with prosperity for the coastal fishers and their communities about to come true. Just for the moment, however, the subsidies were still required for the coastal fishers to carry the coastal societies on their shoulders. The strength of the fishers’ organization and the “thousand boots marching in beat,” and the cultural and political capital afforded by the imagery of the coastal fisher as seen through the lens of the Trollfjord battle, was too much for

43 Finstad, “Markedstilpasning og globalisering.”

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a single bureaucrat. Brochmann got no support from his peers, and left shortly after for the Ministry of Petroleum. The world had changed, but the fishers refused to accept it.

The Fish, not the Fisher Overfishing, which used to be associated with foreign fishing interests and practices, was after 1989 accepted as a domestic issue. Gradually, a new collective understanding of the reality of fisheries, based on a new set of values and principles, was accepted. Not everyone agreed with the new order of things, of course.44 Nevertheless, the dominant perception of the Norwegian fisheries, its values and societal significance, was changing. The transition can be described in terms of a shift in the balance between social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability.45 Arguably, all three dimensions had been underscored in policy documents and used to justify practical policies throughout the post-war period. While the relative importance of these dimensions may be difficult to assess precisely, there is hardly any doubt that social sustainability had been predominant until 1989, with the interests and welfare of coastal fishers and traditional fishing communities the key concern.46 In practical terms, the concern for “employment and settlement on the coast” would trump environmental and economic considerations whenever these conflicted, as demonstrated in the case of subsidies and coastal fleet overfishing. The strength of the coastal fisher in cultural, institutional, and political terms was such that it was unthinkable and morally suspect to suggest that the existing order could be problematic with regard to economic and environmental sustainability.47 This is what changed on April 18, 1989. Now environmental sustainability replaced social sustainability as the most important concern in Norwegian fisheries policy, challenging a host of institutionalized practices. In the months and years that followed, a number of new compromises had to be worked out. We will now trace some of the most important strands in this process. The key element of the April 18 event, the primacy of environmental sustainability, remains in place as a foundation for Norwegian fisheries policy. This is confirmed both by the way the quota model developed for the cod fisheries was

44 45 46 47

Holm, “Verdens fremste sjømatnasjon?” Charles, Sustainable Fishery Systems. Holm, Tveiterås and Elvevoll, “Fisk i fellesskap.” Holm, “Særinteresser versus allmenningsinteresser.”

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gradually adopted for the other commercial fisheries,48 and by the way this principle was codified in the Marine Resources Act of 2008.49 In the current debate over Norwegian fisheries governance, moreover, the priority of environmental sustainability as embedded in the quota regime is not challenged. Instead, the contentious issue concerns the relative importance and acceptable trade-offs between economic and societal concerns.50 The breakthrough of environmental sustainability as the overriding concern is easy to see in hindsight. It was much less clear in the weeks and months after the cod closure became a fact. The first major challenge came during the fall of the same year, when ICES’ quota recommendations for 1990 were made public. For 1989, the total cod quota for the Barents Sea had been 340,000 tons, with a Norwegian share of 178,000 tons. Now, the recent data indicated that the stock was in even worse shape than the marine scientists had assumed in the previous year. For 1990, ICES therefore recommended a sharp cut in a quota that was already at an unprecedented low level. The dire warning from ICES was accepted by the Norwegian-Russian fisheries commission, which set the quota at 200,000 tons, with the Norwegian share amounting to 113,000 tons.51 If the feeling of shock and despair had been widespread among fishers and in fishing communities after April 18, the crisis now reached a new high. Nordlys, the regional newspaper for northern Norway, described how people along the coast reacted with “shock, rage, doubt and disbelief.” Fiskeribladet, the national fisheries newspaper, wrote that the coast experienced an “outright catastrophe,” while the board at the University of Tromsø adopted a resolution stating that the “values endangered today comprise not only the resources of the sea but also our culture.”52 As expected, the new situation quickly led to a discussion of how to divide the quota among different fleet segments. We return to this below. First, however, it is important to note that there was no strong movement to attack the credibility of the scientific advice, even though its record was far from impressive. In Canada, the Northern cod moratorium, which followed a similar pattern of overfishing and weak scientific advice, led to a severe legitimacy crisis for marine scientists, as documented by Finlayson and Bavington.53 In Norway, by contrast, the cod crises of 1989 strengthened the position of marine science in

48 Hersoug, Closing the Commons. 49 Ot.prp.nr.20, Om lov om forvaltning. 50 Holm, Tveiterås and Elvevoll, “Fisk i fellesskap.” 51 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.” 52 Quotes from Jentoft, Hengende snøre, 11–13. 53 Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; Bavington, Managed Annihilation.

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fisheries resource management. Instead of blaming the scientists, seeking to undermine their credibility, the dominant reaction was that more science was needed to avoid similar crises in the future. A letter from the NFA, sent to the Ministry of Fisheries in the fall of 1989, illustrates the point: The recurrent downgrading of the scientists’ estimations of the stock status during the last few years makes it clear that the research effort has not been up to the task. On this basis, NFA reiterates the request that the research activities are strengthened so that this is not repeated in the future.54

The exceptionally small cod quota forced an issue that important actors in the sector had been reluctant to take on. Until 1989, no consistent quota sharing mechanism had been in place. Under the small quota for 1990, which would be strictly enforced, such a system had to be found. Most agreed that the existing “Olympic” regime, with open access and virtually free fishing until the quota had been caught, was unacceptable. That would favor larger over smaller vessels, and northern fishers over those from the south; it would shrink the season and create unpredictability for all. While such a regime might be sufficient to secure environmental sustainability, it would be a disaster in terms of economic and social sustainability.55 There was certainly agreement that something had to be done, but it was more difficult to find a solution. The propositions varied widely. Some suggested closing down the fishing in the Barents Sea, while others contended that the Lofoten fishery should be closed. Some wanted the trawlers out, and others argued that the trawlers should have priority.56 Instead, a series of compromises was negotiated, by which most of the fleet segments and interest groups in the fishery got their share of the quota, as well as co-responsibility for rebuilding the stock.57 An important part of the package was the agreement on quota sharing between the trawlers and the coastal fleet. After intense negotiations, the NFA decided to recommend the Trawler Ladder, by which the cod quota would be divided differently depending on the quota size. If the total Norwegian quota was very small (300 000 tons), the coastal fleet would get 65 percent and the trawlers 35 percent. In between the two extreme

54 Quoted from Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april,” 212. 55 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.” 56 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april,” 202. 57 An important exception to this was the Sami fishing interest, which was not acknowledged during the process and would only be recognized and explicitly brought into the quota regime 20 years later. See Evjen, “Åpning for sjømsaiske rettigheter.”

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points, the trawlers’ share would increase in steps, hence making a “ladder.” The mechanism was controversial – it was adopted by a 10 to 8 majority vote in the NFA council. It was nevertheless accepted by the Ministry and remains in place to this day.58 The Trawler Ladder was a compromise. On the one hand, it acknowledged the trawler fleet as a legitimate participant group in Norwegian fisheries. Given the strong position of the coastal fisheries in Norwegian fisheries policy, this is significant. The era of coastal fisher hegemony in Norway was over. On the other hand, the Trawler Ladder also acknowledged the particular role of the coastal fleet in securing employment and settlement on the coast. This is reflected in the larger share allocated to the coastal fleet when the total Norwegian quota is low. In order for the coastal fleet to serve its role as a foundation for coastal communities and culture, it had to have priority when the resources were under pressure. With the establishment of the Trawler Ladder, the next question concerned the allocation of the coastal quota among vessels. As the experience from the 1989 season had demonstrated, a system of open access and competition under a small quota was unfair as well as unsustainable. In order to address this, a predictable and equitable allocation system had to be devised. Nevertheless, this would inevitably encroach on the principle of open access to the fish resource for the coastal population. It threatened, in other words, the fisheries commons, a symbolic and institutional cornerstone of Norwegian fisheries policy.59 Again, the result was a compromise. The basic solution was a vessel quota system, where vessel length would decide the size of the quota, and the catch record for the three previous years would serve as a qualification basis.60 In this compromise, the most active fishers, as indicated by the catch record, was first in line. While this was based on a widely accepted principle of fairness, it was also in line with a longstanding policy in Norwegian fisheries policy during the post-war era, the support and encouragement of the active, full-time fishers.61 The flip side of this, however, was the exclusion of a majority of occasional and part-time fishers, to whom the fishery was nevertheless an important part of their lifestyle and working regime.62 If anyone was going to be able to make a living from the fisheries, however, such hard measures were difficult to avoid. In order to justify the vessel quota system beyond that, two important provisions were included in the package. The first was a strong emphasis and promise that the vessel quota was a temporary

58 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.” 59 Hersoug, Closing the Commons. 60 Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.” 61 Holm, “Kan torsken temmes?” 62 Brox, Hva Skjer I Nord-Norge?; Brox, Nord-Norge.

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crisis measure, which would be lifted as soon as the cod came back.63 The other was that the exclusion was not total. Those who did not qualify for the vessel quota system would still be allowed to participate in the open group, where the vessels would compete for a share of the quota.64 Both these provisions bowed to the continuation of the principle of open access. Whereas the most active and successful fishers were given preferential treatment to be able to make a living from fishing, the coastal population would not be excluded from fishing altogether. The vessel quota system built on the premise that environmental sustainability was vital, but it was nevertheless clearly focused on the trade-off between economic sustainability and social sustainability. The concern for the viability of full-time fishers catered to the economic dimension, whereas the attempts to secure continued open access for occasional and part-time fishers spoke to the social dimension. While this delivered a balance of sorts, it also inferred that economic concerns were perceived as more important than social concerns. This would become clearer as time went by. A first instantiation came later in the fall of 1989, in a confrontation between the Ministry and the NFA over the cut-off point in the qualification scheme for the vessel quota. That is, how many vessels were going to be allowed into the quota system, and hence how many would be excluded? Here, the NFA supported the most inclusive alternative. The Ministry rejected that, and adopted a cut-off point that would allow for larger quotas for each vessel included. The result was a scheme that included 3,500 vessels, which was 900 short of the NFA’s preferred total.65 This struggle was directly linked to the different perspectives on the future of government subsidies. When the NFA supported a more inclusive Individual Vessel Quota (IVQ) system, it was part of a strategy to secure generous government subsidies.66 This was not on the agenda, however. Instead, vindicating Brochmann’s analysis of the problems of fishery subsidies, the Ministry had already committed to a plan for the reduction of fisheries subsidies. This included international trade agreements that would phase out trade-distorting subsidies in the fisheries. The first of these, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), was made public at the end of 1989. A few years later, the same provisions were included in the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement between Norway and the EU, which led to the elimination of the most important subsidy mechanisms

63 64 65 66

Holm, Rånes and Hersoug, “Political Attributes.” Holm, Rånes and Hersoug, “Aldri mer 18. april.” Hersoug, Closing the Commons. Holm, Finstad and Christensen, “Aldri mer 18. april.”

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in the Main Agreement. The agreement, which at the time had become an empty shell, was formally cancelled in 2004.67 In practice, this meant that the NFA strategy in the autumn of 1989 failed. Instead of continuing a subsidy system by which the government would support the fisheries whenever fish markets or resources failed, the sector now had to be economically sustainable on its own. In the end, this meant that not only environmental, but also economic, sustainability after 1989 would be more important than social sustainability in Norway’s fisheries. How this has worked was demonstrated in 1994, when the NFA debated the future of the IVQ system. Whereas the cod stock had indeed recovered by then, and the vessel quota system could be abandoned, the system was prolonged for the cod fishery and gradually extended to include other fisheries. Instead of a temporary crisis measure, as emphasized in 1989, it has been consolidated and become a permanent part of the Norwegian fisheries regime. While several factors can explain this,68 the reduction of state subsidies clearly played a role. Even as the cod returned and the vessel quota increased, the income level did not improve to the same extent, since the subsidies were pulled back. Instead of returning to the open commons, the new requirement of economic sustainability pointed towards increasing barriers to entry in order to keep up with the rising cost levels in the Norwegian petroleum economy. At the turn of the new century, this materialized in the form of a structural quota system, by which the quota of two or more vessels can be fished by one vessel.69 This does not mean that social sustainability has been abandoned. On the contrary, this is still inscribed as an important concern in the Marine Resources Act. It is also reflected in the form of safeguard clauses in the structural policy, such as caps on the number of quotas that can be concentrated on a single one vessel, geographical restrictions on quota trading, and the exemption of vessels below 11 meters from the scheme. Nevertheless, the social sustainability dimension in practice has little edge against the economic sustainability and will usually give way if they are in conflict. In order to serve as a basis for sound settlement and employment in the coastal communities, the argument goes, vessels have to be economically viable. Hence, social sustainability is subsumed under the principle of economic sustainability and cannot usually serve as a justification for regulatory interventions in its own right.

67 Christensen, “Under a New Management Regime.” 68 Holm, Rånes and Hersoug, “Political Attributes.” 69 Hersoug, Closing the Commons.

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The End of Overfishing The story of 1989 is complex. We realize that but make no excuses. In order to explain the shock and anger felt by fishers and coastal people in April of that year, we had to reach all the way back to events in Trollfjorden, almost 100 years previously. We had to trace the development of the iconic coastal fisher, from its flimsy existence in poverty and dependence towards its modern shape, made proud and powerful through its integration in a nexus of interlocking institutions and subsidy schemes. We had to show how that heroic figure was locked into systems of knowledge and morality committed to its inherent incapacity for overfishing. In the strictly binary world that ensued, the trawlers represented nothing but evil, the coastal fisher nothing but good. Taking on the problem of overfishing in this context, then, was not simply a question of accepting the responsibility and rationality of resource management, as charged to the coastal state after UNCLOS. In order for that mission to be realized, the whole system of institutions by which the coastal fisher was absolved from the sins of overfishing had to be confronted and reconstructed. Learning from the fate of Brochmann, the Ministry bided its time, locked itself to international trade agreements, and shifted much of the heavy lifting to the NFA. The acceptance of overfishing in Norway came late. When it came, it also resulted in a fundamental reordering of the sector. As the fish replaced the coastal fisher as the key client and object of protection, the order of priority among social, economic, and environmental concerns was turned on its head. In a beautiful but sad symmetry, what used to be most cherished was now lost, with just a few traces left in symbolic exhortations in legal texts.

Bibliography Bavington, Dean. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. Brox, Ottar. Hva skjer i Nord-Norge? En studie iI norsk utkantpolitikk. Oslo: Pax, 1969. Brox, Ottar. Nord-Norge: Fra allmenning til koloni. Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. Charles, Anthony T. Sustainable Fishery Systems. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2008 Christensen, Pål. “En havenes forpester – et kjempestinkdyr.” Om trålspørsmålet i Norge før 2. verdenskrig. Historisk Tids skrift 1991. Christensen, Pål. “Under a New Management Regime, 1970–2015.” In Fish, Coast and Communities: A History of Norway, edited by Nils Kolle, Alf Ragnar Nielssen, Atle Døssland, and Pål Christensen, 261–290. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017. Christensen, Pål. “The New Coastal Society After 1970.” In Fish, Coast and Communities: A History of Norway, edited by Nils Kolle, Alf Ragnar Nielssen, Atle Døssland, and Pål Christensen, 323–350. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017.

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Christensen, Pål, and Abraham Hallenstvedt. På første hånd: Norges Råfisklag gjennom femti år. Tromsø: Norges Råfisklag, 1990. Evjen, Bjørg. “Åpning for sjømsaiske rettigheter.” In Havet, fisken og oljen, 1970–2014: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, Volume 4, edited by Pål Christensen, Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Finlayson, Alan Christopher. Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977 to 1990. St. John’s, Newfoundland: ISER Books, 1994. Finstad, Bjørn-Petter. “Fiskeriministeren som stoppet fisket. Bjarne Mørk Eidem.” In Uriaspost ved Kongens bord. Norske fiskeriminstre 1946–2003, edited by Th. Tande. Norsk fiskerinæring: Eidsvoll, 2003. Finstad, Bjørn-Petter. “Markedstilpasning og globalisering.” In Havet, fisken og oljen 1970–2014: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, Volume IV, edited by Pål Christensen, 215–250. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Finstad, Bjørn-Petter, Edgar Henriksen, and Petter Holm. “Fra krise til krise – forventninger og svik i norsk fiskerinæring.” Økonomisk fiskeriforskning, 2012. Harsson, Bjørn Geir, and George Preiss. “Norwegian Baselines, Maritime Boundaries and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Arctic Review on Law and Politics 3 (2012). Heidbrink, Ingo, Werner Beckmann, and Matthias Keller. Und heute gibt es Fisch: 100 Jahre Fischindustrie und Fischgroßhandel in Schlaglichtern. Bremerhaven: Bundesverband d. deutschen Fischindustrie u. d. Fischgroßhandels, 2003. Heidbrink, Ingo. “Beyond the North Sea: The Emergence of Germany’s Distant-Water Trawling Industry.” In Conflict, Overfishing and Spatial Expansion in the North Atlantic Fisheries, c. 1400–2000, edited by David J. Starkey, Daniel Thorleifsen, and Robb Robinson, 97–104. Hull: Maritime Historical Studies Centre, 2010. Hersoug, Bjørn. Closing the Commons: Norwegian Fisheries from Open Access to Private Property. Delft: Eburon, 2005. Hersoug Bjørn, Bjørn-Petter Finstad, and Pål Christensen. “A System of Norwegian Fish Sales Unions: An Anachronism or Successful Adaptation to Modern Fisheries?” Acta Borealia 32 (2015). Holm, Petter. “Særinteresser versus allmenningsinteresser i forhandlingsøkonomien: Om Hovedavtalen for fiskerinæringa.” Tidsskrift for Samfunnsforskning 32 (1991): 99–119. Holm, Petter. “Kan torsken temmes? Moderniseringsprosesser i norsk fiskerinæring 1935–1995.” In Det nye Nord-Norge: Avhengighet og modernisering i nord, edited by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, 109–142. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 1996. Holm, Petter, Stein Arne Rånes, and Bjørn Hersoug. “Political Attributes of Rights-based Management Systems: The Case of Individual Vessel Quotas in the Norwegian Coastal Cod Fishery.” In Property Rights and Regulatory Systems in the Fisheries, edited by David Symes, 113–126. Oxford: Fishing News Books, 1998. Holm, Petter. “Verdens fremste sjømatnasjon?” In Havet, fisken og oljen 1970–2014: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, Volume IV, edited by Pål Christensen, 425–451. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Holm, Petter, Bjørn-Petter Finstad, and Pål Christensen. “Aldri mer 18. april.” In Havet, fisken og oljen 1970–2014: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, Volume IV, edited by Pål Christensen, 185–213. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Holm, Petter, Kathrine Tveiterås, and Edel O. Elvevoll. “Fisk i fellesskap.” In Det norske samfunn, bind 1, edited by Ivar Frønes and Lise Kjølsrød, 168–188. Oslo: Gyldendal, 2016.

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Hylen, Arvid, Odd Nakken, and Kjell Nedreaas. “Northeast Arctic Cod: Fisheries, Life History, Stock Fluctuations and Management.” In Norwegian Spring-Spawning Herring and Northeast Arctic Cod, edited by Odd Nakken, 83–118. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2008. Iversen, Thor. Trålfiskets historie: Årsberetning vedkommende Norges Fiskerier. Bergen: Directorate of Fisheries, 1937. Jentoft, Svein. Hengende snøre: Fiskerikrisen og gramtiden på kysten. Oslo: Ad Notam, 1991. Jentoft, Svein, and Bjørn-Petter Finstad. “Building Fisheries Institutions through Collective Action in Norway.” MAST, Springer, 2018. Jentoft, Svein, and Knut H. Mikalsen. “Government Subsidies in Norwegian Fisheries: Regional Development or Political Favoritism?” Marine Policy 11 (1987): 217–228. Johansen, Karl Egil. “Motstand mot ny teknologi og driftsmåtar.” In En næring i omforming 1880–1970: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, bind III, edited by Nils Kolle, 105–134. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Kolle, Nils. “Staten og lønnsomhetsproblemet.” In En næring i omforming 1880–1970: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, bind III, edited by Nils Kolle, 515–532. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Kolle, Nils. “Strid om veivalg.” In En næring i omforming 1880–1970: Norges fiskeri- og kysthistorie, bind III, edited by Nils Kolle, 395–416. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014. Kolle, Nils, and Pål Christensen. “Disputing Maritime Domains, 1910–2010.” In Fish, Coast and Communities: A History of Norway, edited by Nils Kolle, Alf Ragnar Nielssen, Atle Døssland, and Pål Christensen, 235–260. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017. Kolle, Nils, Alf Ragnar Nielssen, Atle Døssland, and Pål Christensen. Fish, Coast and Communities: A History of Norway. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017. Lassen, Hans, Ciaran Kelly, and Michael Sissenwine. “ICES Advisory Framework 1977–2012: From F Max to Precautionary Approach and Beyond.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 71 (2013): 166–172. Nielssen, Alf Ragnar. “Seal Hunters and Early Fishermen, up to 1300 AD.” In Fish, Coast and Communities: A History of Norway, edited by Nils Kolle, Alf Ragnar Nielssen, Atle Døssland, and Pål Christensen, 39–70. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017. Ot. prp. nr. 20. Om lov om forvaltning av viltlevande marine ressursar (havressurslova). Oslo: Fiskeridepartementet, 2007–2008. Posti, Per. Trollfjordslaget – myter og virkelighet. Cassiopeia: Tromsø, 1991. Schwach, Vera. Havet, fisken og vitenskapen: Fra fiskeriundersøkelser til Havforskningsinstitutt 1860–2000. Bergen: Havforskningsinstituttet, 2000. Schwach, Vera. “The Sea around Norway: Science, Resource Management, and Environmental Concerns, 1860–1970.” Environmental History 18 (2012): 101–110. SSB. Historisk statistikk 1994. Oslo: Statistisk Sentralbyrå, 1994.

Fernando González Laxe

7 The European Common Fisheries Policy: An Economic Approach to Overfishing Solutions Overfishing is a world problem with a significant number of social, economic, and environmental consequences. Every day, millions of people depend on fish, not only as a direct source of food, but also as a way of working. Now, more than ever, oceans and seas are faced with a serious challenge when it comes to meeting the food needs of the growing population from both developing and developed countries. Progress in vessel equipment and fishing methods makes possible the fishing of a higher number of species at more remote distances away from port and at depths over 1,000 meters. All these factors have a big impact on the stock growth. Over the last few years, world consequences of overfishing have been scrutinized by scientists, economists, and public officials, accounting for a level that does not ensure sustainability; that is to say, they directly affect fish stock recovery. Moreover, overfishing has become a threat to social progress and to economic prosperity in many countries, particularly in certain communities and areas that mainly depend on fishing. Fishing becomes a key element in the diet of the population, and in some countries fish represents 50 percent of an average diet. A decrease in fish stocks in some coastal areas reduces access to this source of sustenance for a substantial number of people in the world. Likewise, an increase in fishing activities beyond the limits of biological sustainability poses a serious risk to marine life. This chapter explores the causes of overfishing. It focuses on economic factors and highlights the current concerns of the European Union, which has overfishing regulation as one of its main objectives.

Definition Overfishing entails catching an excessive volume of fish, which jeopardizes the reproduction of marine species. Overfishing accounts for the situation in which exploitation of natural resources surpasses the rate of repopulation. In other words, continuous exploitation can lead to a total destruction of the resource. We talk about overfishing when an increase in fishing activity involves a reduction in fish https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-008

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catches – even leading to disappearance – a decrease in fish average length, size and age, a smaller average weight, and a lower reproductive ability. Overfishing can be defined as the excess of catches below a biological reference point, while exploitation refers to exhaustion of reproductive potential below a limited biological reference point. As a consequence, overexploitation measures the relationship of the decrease in excess of the spawning stock below a limited reference point that, in many cases, is expressed as a fraction of the limited reference point in a non-exploitation context or any other safe level. In quantitative terms, overexploitation occurs when spawning stock biomass falls below 20 percent of safe levels, or the regular level without a fishing exploitation context. Overfishing can occur without noticing overexploitation necessarily. This way, overfishing marine resources has been threatening biodiversity for a long time. Overfishing affects the balance of marine ecosystems and food safety. On the one hand, it may lead to a strong reduction of fish stocks in the epipelagic zone (the surface layer of the ocean where primary productivity occurs, since there is enough light for the photosynthesis to take place). On the other hand, overfishing makes other species move to greater depths (beyond 1,000 meters). That is the reason why there are so many conflicts and protests about the use of fishing gear, as they may cause a considerable imbalance in the ecosystem and in the environment. Some researchers have determined the consequences in deep ocean ecosystems and have warned about the situation of the stocks in the benthic zone (those which live in the bottom of the sea and do not move around very much)1; other scholars have undertaken research into the attitude of certain fishermen who increasingly fish younger species, some of them not having reached sexual maturity, which definitely contributes to the reduction of stocks, or to their possible disappearance in the short run.2 Likewise, there is a relationship between fishing with specific fishing gear and bycatch. We cannot always undertake exclusively targeted fishing by focusing on a specific stock. Usually, bycatch comprises several species aside from the target, which means that some species get trapped in the fishing gear and are eventually discarded. These species are injured or dead and they are mostly thrown into the sea. Global assessment of this bycatch is not easy. However, FAO are trying to calculate it.3

1 Ramírez-Llondra, “Man and the Last Great Wilderness.” 2 Pauly and Zeller, “Catch Reconstructions.” 3 Others who have attempted this calculation include: Alverton, Global Assessment; Cashion, “Reconstructing Global Marine Fishing Gear Use”; Zeller, “Reconstructing Global Marine Fishing Gear Use.”

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The Origin of the Problem of Overfishing World production of fishing products has been steadily increasing, with the amount of fish caught tripling since the beginning of the twentieth century. Fishing activity has increased at an annual rate of 3.2%, much greater than the world’s population growth rate of 1.8%.4 Over the last few years, the output of the global capture fishery has remained below 100 million tons per annum, even though vessel size, power, and fuel range have increased and there have been technological improvements in fishing, fish detection, and conservation. In 2016, world production stood at 170.9 million tons, with the capture fishery amounting to 79.3 million tons, a fall of almost two million tons on the 2015 figure. It was also less than the amount coming from aquaculture, estimated at 80 million tons. Nevertheless, the total first sale value of capture fishery represents 362 billion dollars, and aquaculture 232 billion dollars.5 World fish consumption per person has doubled over the last 50 years, from 9.9 kg per capita in the 1960s to 19.2 and 20.3 kg per capita in 2012 and 2016 respectively. This doubling can be explained by a combination of factors, including: world population growth and a rise in the rate of urbanization; higher income; new species for consumption; and more and improved distribution channels. Growing consumption indicates that fish is the second most important source of protein, after pork, for the world’s human population. It accounts for 16.7% of the global protein supply. An increase in population in Asia and Africa has intensified the demand for food, particularly from natural sources such as fish. As a consequence of the pressure put on world fish stocks, the amount of fish taken from seas and oceans is decreasing due to the fact that some countries have not stabilized fishing pressure in certain areas and for certain species, and also because of the negative impact of illegal and unregulated fishing activity on the ocean biomass. In its 2018 report on the state of world fisheries and aquaculture, FAO stated that 59.9% of the marine species it analyzed and monitored are within biologically sustainable levels, whereas 33.1% are being fished at biologically unsustainable levels – a “worrisome situation,” especially as 40 years ago, in 1974, 90 percent of the world fisheries monitored by FAO were being used in a biologically sustainable way. Nowadays, the trend is on the decline, going down to 66.9% in 2015, while species above biological safe levels increased from 10 percent in 1974 to 33.1% in 2015.

4 FAO, 2014. State of World Fisheries. 5 FAO, 2018. State of World Fisheries.

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The biggest pressures are located in the European Atlantic and Eastern China. Most marine ecosystems are threatened in deep seas and in coastal areas, with overfishing the main cause of the decrease in fish, crustacean, and mollusk stocks,6 compounded by factors such as climate change, pollution, and habitat degradation. In spite of considerable progress in fishing management in some areas and for certain species, scientists issue warnings about the deteriorating environmental situation and decline in resources. Other scholars argue that there are no scientific data that enable us to predict and know how to improve the situation of specific fisheries in the world, so overexploitation of fisheries cannot be proved.7 In the same way, unsustainable fishing management is not always evident, as measures implemented in certain areas have proved efficient,8 and in some fisheries, fish stock levels have remained stable.9 Other researchers consider that the number of fish reserves that are overexploited have been more or less stable over the last few years.10 Nevertheless, other observers share a more critical and pessimistic view. They state that only rarely have fisheries been sustainable, and that the build up of fishing pressure since the 1980s has resulted in the depletion of some fishing resources.11 L´Agence Européenne pour l´Environnement (2015) says that 58 percent of commercial stocks are not considered environmentally good and that 40 percent of European vessels are poorly evaluated. Finally, current fishing stocks face uncertainty as a consequence of technological improvements, geographic expansion, exploitation of new species, and some relaxed fishing management measures.12 FAO (2018) noted that the fishing world has modified its behavior when it comes to sustainable fishing. The organization identified overcapacity and a troublesome situation regarding stocks in developing countries, which is not counterbalanced by better management carried out by developed countries. Finding a balance in these circumstances will not be easy, as political coordination and more financial and human resources, as well as cutting-edge technology, are needed to improve efficiency in environmental sustainability.

6 Pauly, “Towards Sustainability.” 7 Hilborn, “Institutions, Incentives.” 8 Hilborn, “Biodiversity Loss in the Ocean.” 9 Worm, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries”; Hilborn and Ovando, “Reflections.” 10 Branch, “Contrasting Global Trends.” 11 Pauly, “Global Trends.” 12 Pauly and Zeller, “Catch Reconstructions 2017”; Pauly and Zeller, “Comments.”

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With this situation in mind, another group of researchers argue that FAO data are undervalued,13 and that about 24 percent of fisheries have collapsed.14 Other scientists emphasize the significant role of artisanal fishing activity. Although resource assessment is complex, it is believed that small-scale fisheries are usually in a worse state than more advanced fisheries.15 Overfishing has many impacts (see Table 7.1). First, there are negative ecological consequences, since some stocks need more time to reproduce and this could imply a reduction of fishing productivity. Second, productivity is affected when vessels target one or several species, because they also increase bycatch and discards. Third, fleet specialization levels have consequences, particularly when it comes to migratory species, multi-area species or any other type fished totally or partially in the open sea, since in such instances the effort required to recover overexploited stocks is greater.

Table 7.1: Keys aspects of overfishing. CAUSES

OVERFISHING CONSEQUENCES

Inefficient management measures

Biological aspects: biomass, fish stocks.

Discards

Environmental aspects: ecosystems, habitats.

Bycatch

Economic aspects: income, impact on local economies, prices

Unregulated, unreported, and illegal fishing

Labor market aspects: employment

Pirate fishing

Food aspects: consumption and external dependency

Fishers’ attitude, behavior, and approach

Commercial aspects: external flow

Inappropriate and relaxed policies to control, monitor, and penalize fishing activities

Health aspects: source of protein

13 Pauly and Zeller, “Catch Reconstructions 2017”; Pauly and Zeller, “Comments.” 14 Watson, “Primary Productivity Demands.” 15 Costello, “Status and Solutions.”

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Dealing with the Problem of Overfishing: The Role of the European Union The first attempts to fix and avoid overfishing focused on how to protect and manage resources with regard to fishing gear, fish size and length, fish quantities, and authorized fish species. This was successfully achieved by an efficient enforcement of rules and regulations, by close surveillance, strict fines and by efforts made by fishing authorities that were able to modify fishermen´s behavior so that they would become more rational and supportive in the long run. Some of these measures were very strict in the way they were written and enforced, while others were much more relaxed. The Common Fisheries Policy was established in 1983 by the six founding member states of the European Economic Community (France, Western Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, and Luxembourg). It is the framework for all fishing activities performed by EU member states, as well as the fisheries that are undertaken within EU waters. The first regulations were enforced in the 1970s, when the 200-mile limit was not yet a reality. The rules were based on the idea that resources were limitless and the fishing management goal was to maximize captures and profits. The authors of the fishing policy focused exclusively on measures related to water access and inter-country reciprocity; on fishing allocations (based on the principle of relative stability); on measures aiming at increasing vessel size and power thanks to privileged access to EU financing and trade measures, which guaranteed average prices in order to protect national markets from products imported from third countries. The goal was to boost productivity and growth based on the example of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), even though the starting point was just the opposite, since the agricultural sector had a surplus and the fishing sector had a shortfall. Yet, actions and policies proved to be quite similar. The CFP had a clear dichotomy. On the one hand, it was intended to coordinate resource policy with structure policy. On the other hand, trade policy had to go hand in hand with land activities. Regulation 2141/70, and later Regulation 101/ 76, focused on “the rational use of marine biological resources; overfishing prevention; and how to avoid or reduce overcapitalization.” With this aim in mind, some conservation measures were established to set restrictions to captures of certain species in specific areas, according to the fishing season, methods, and gear. These were technical regulatory measures designed to deliver a noticeable improvement in stocks. When the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark, countries with major fisheries, joined the European Economic Community, the Common Fisheries Policy (1983) was defined. It established a rational management of resources

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(according to the principle of subsidiarity) and a close control and measures to increase fishermen´s responsibility. In mid-1980s, Greece, Portugal, and Spain joined the EEC. Then, the CFP became internationally significant, due to the significant fishing interests of the new countries. The CFP had four main pillars: conservation rules; structural action guidelines; market organization measures; and a framework for external relationships. Under these rules, each member state had to guarantee CFP enforcement in their own territory. The CFP was reformed in 1992. Fishing effort was introduced as the way to proceed when it came to resource conservation policies. The European Community was aware of the fleet capacity excess, and Multi-Annual Guidance Programs (MAGPs) were established to reduce and make fleets more modern. These were ineffective, however, and therefore in 2001, the European Commission published the Green Book, a document to be checked by interested parties regarding CFP evolution and assessment. The goal was first to have a multi-annual multi-species approach to reduce uncertainty and allow fishermen to plan their activities more efficiently in the long run. The second objective was to implement plans for the Recovery of Stocks for some species, and thirdly, Regional Consultative Committees were established. Here, administrators, politicians, businesses, and scientists came together to deal with each fishery in the most appropriate way and according to their own characteristics. The EC tried to guarantee the rational exploitation of fishing resources in a responsible way so that economic and social requirements as well as consumer rights and biological requisites of the marine ecosystem could be met. In 2002, the Green Book was reformed with the aim of achieving sustainable management of fishing activities, more stable income and jobs, the protection of the marine environment, and food quality. It did not incorporate a successful mechanism to control the excess of the fishing effort. Many research projects pointed out the lack of self-criticism for partially fulfilling the goals set, for inappropriate regulation techniques, unsuccessful compliance procedures, inefficient fine systems, and problems related to the lack of incentives for fishermen who were in charge of preserving, protecting and keeping resources. The CFP was accountable for actions and rules, and prior to each reform there was always a re-assessment process, which, on many occasions, has questioned its efficiency.16

16 Lequesne, L´Europe Bleue; González-Laxe, “Dysfunctions;” Khalilian, “Designed for Failure.”

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The measures implemented for the recovery of stocks to sustainable levels were heavily criticized.17 The criticisms included: a) scientific recommendations to prevent stock overexploitation were not always available or monitored by political agencies, since the European Council is the organization that sets the fishing quotas for state members; b) these recommendations to be followed are not very reliable because the EC depends on information coming from producers and from research with too much room for maneuver; c) if these recommendations and measures for stock recovery are very restrictive, the fishing sector itself will try to cancel or disobey them; d) the main problem lies in the fact that tools and actions enforced since 1983 are not based on sustainability and precautionary principles. The last reform, which took place in 2013 (Regulation 1380/2013), aimed at exploiting resources in a sustainable way, according to the principles of the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). For each stock, biomass must be below the precautionary level that guarantees stock recovery. Besides, fishing pressure over a stock must be moderate so as not to threaten the capacity for a stock to recover, and above all, to increase a significant amount of biomass, which ensures long-term maximum capture. The second main goal is designed to eliminate overfishing between 2015 and 2020. Results between the years 2000 and 2010 show that the pressure on marine resources in the European waters of the Atlantic Ocean had diminished noticeably, and this has contributed to the improvement of stock in fishing populations. This evolution infers that fishers’ behavior complied with recommendations, whose effects were positive. However, between 2010 and 2014, these improvements stabilized. The fishing pressure was far greater than the goal of MSY-based management. The consequences show that less than half of the stocks that are being scientifically monitored achieved the goals set in the CFP. The situation in the Mediterranean Sea is worse, with more than 90 percent of stocks considered overexploited. The European Commission itself shows how sustainable fishing is becoming a reality little by little in its annual reports (see Tables 7.2 and 7.3). The 2018 document highlighted eight conclusions:18

17 Mulvaney, Inverser le courant. 18 COM (2018) 452 final.

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Table 7.2: TAC estimation supported by scientific advice, 2010–2018. Year

% of TACs in line with scientific advice

% of TACs not in line with scientific advice

% of TACs without scientific advice









































































Source: Communication from the European Commission on the state of play of the CFP and consultation on the fishing opportunities for 2019. COM(2018).452 final.

Table 7.3: Number of TACs with scientific advice to determine the maximum sustainable yield, 2005–2018. Year

TACs with MSY advice

TACs similar or lower than advised

TACs below recommendations

% TACs similar or lower than recommended















































































































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Table 7.3 (continued ) Year

TACs with MSY advice

TACs similar or lower than advised

TACs below recommendations

% TACs similar or lower than recommended































Source: Communication from the European Commission on the state of play of the CFP and consultation on the fishing opportunities for 2019. COM (2018). 452 final.

1)

2)

3)

4)

5) 6) 7) 8)

the fishing pressure shows a downward trend; the F/F msy indicator stabilized around 1; y TAC´s established in line with MSY ruling went up to 54 stocks, or 69 percent of all captures in the Northeastern Atlantic; the reproductive biomass has increased 39 percent in the period 2013–2016, while the percentage of the fish population that does not reach biological levels went down from 65 percent to 30 percent in the period 2003–2016; socio-economic profits are rising considerably; since the net profits reached 1,300 million euros, the net profit margin adds up to 17 percent, and the average salary has improved by 2.7% per year in spite of the fact that employment has decreased 1.3% each year since 2008; a better balance between fishing capacity and fishing potential is observed. Fleets are being reduced and tonnage is almost 20 percent below maximum levels and over 13 percent above power maximum levels; there is an improvement in stocks in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, even though the scenario is still quite alarming; advances are observed in multi-annual plans; there is more international awareness about ocean health; the landing obligation, with the consequences that this entails, is planned for January 2019.

In spite of these positive findings, there is still cause for concern in some areas. L´Association Française d´Halieutique argues that, in 2015, ICES had inventoried 167 different stocks. For 125 of them, there is no extant analysis because data is still incomplete or because these stocks are not considered a priority. Only 42 stocks are known (25 percent of the total amount) and evidently these are the most important and significant, which represent 90 percent of captures in the areas managed by the European Union.

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Among these 42 stocks, 16 achieve the “double criteria” goals set by the CFP. On the one hand, they register high levels of biomass, and therefore stock collapse is unlikely; on the other hand, they exhibit moderate fishing pressure according to the Maximum Sustainable Yield criteria. Another 38 stocks are being exploited according to the principles of sustainability, included in the CFP criteria. They represent 24 percent of captures. Finally, 26 stocks are found below the optimal goals for two reasons: either biomass is below biological safe levels (five stocks) or because the fishing pressure is greater than the MSY goal (14 stocks) and there are also cases with both characteristics (seven stocks). They represent 74 percent of captures and 62.2% of the stocks on which there is some information available. It is clear that the European Union aims at avoiding overfishing by limiting fleet pressure levels, which allow captures around MSY levels. This goal should be achieved in 2020. However, the prospects up to now are not so good for three reasons: first, the fishing pressure increased in the period 2010–2014, above MSY; second, the number of stocks that fulfill the requirements defined by CFP have not progressed as expected, since they only represent 30–50 percent of the stocks assessed; third, the stock average numbers remain at a standstill. Although assessments show some improvement in certain species and in certain areas (plaice in the North Sea), there are also discouraging situations for other species (sole and prawn in the Celtic Sea). The Commission wants all TACs to achieve a MSY situation by 2020. The main goal is sustainability. Despite difficulties and complexities, there are four encouraging signs: 1) the number of stocks that comply with scientific recommendations according to MSY is growing. There were 66 stocks in 2016, although this number is lower than in the past. The European Commission says that this is due to methodological modifications; 2) the number of stocks where fishing mortality is higher than MSY-based mortality has been decreasing since 2005; 3) the number of stocks where mortality is lower than the amount established as MSY is increasing; 4) the number of TACs in line with F msy has been increasing substantially over the last few years. In 2018 there was a total of 53 stocks, compared to the 44 stocks recorded in 2017. Nevertheless, research conducted by Poseidon Aquatic, requested by The Pew Charitable Trust (2017), concludes that the European Union and its member states need to speed up the efforts to put an end to overfishing with the aim of complying with deadlines. Taking into account official data released by the European Commission, fishing limits are still too high and a large number of

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fish populations are not recovered yet.19 This means that some improvements can be seen with regard to the reduction of overfishing levels, but overfishing remains a considerable problem, because decision-makers keep establishing fishing limits that are too high (55 percent in 2017 – that is to say more than half are above scientifically recommended levels; 61 percent in 2015; 62 percent in 2013). Therefore, it is quite obvious that the EU is not moving swiftly enough to put an end to overfishing by 2020 (see Table 7.4).

Table 7.4: Percentage of European Union capture limits in relation to ICES scientific recommendations, 2013–2017 (%). 









Above recommended levels











Matching recommended levels











Below recommended levels











Without available scientific recommendations











Sources: STECF (2017); Poseidon Aquatic (2017).

The same applies to recommendations on biomass growth. Generally speaking, we can say it is increasing but this recovery is not fast enough. In official reports, a reduced number of fish populations that have recovered above biomass level, capable of achieving MSY, is observed. Likewise, there is a lack of data or clear reference points to reach MSY. In short, less than 10 percent of fish populations analyzed have official scientific information of their biomass level in line with the CFP goals. Due to this lack of information, other reference points are used in order to assess progress regarding the main goals. The percentage of populations that have not recovered varies between 24 percent and 56 percent, depending on the reference point, above the levels that are able to produce MSY. Finally, it is necessary to point out that the situation of stocks is not homogeneous in all the fishing areas managed by the EU and member states. There are some areas with more data available, while some have better sustainability rates, and other areas have a number of stocks where fishing mortality is much greater than the recommended level.

19 STECF, Monitoring the Performance.

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In short, since the passing of the current CFP in 2013, none of the governmental agreements has complied with scientific recommendations that would guarantee a sustainable exploitation of fish populations within the EU. Most of the fishing limits were established above the levels recommended by ICES scientific committee. The situation varies across regions. According to 2017 data, 59 percent of the stocks in northwestern waters, 57 percent in southwestern waters, 48 percent in northeastern stocks, and 40 percent in the Baltic Sea display high levels of exploitation. These arguments have been prevalent over the last few years. Recently, when the results of the 2019 guidelines were analyzed,20 the double standard is still apparent. The Commission and the Governments are satisfied with the results, whereas the environmental organizations and some scientists warn about the loss of opportunities. As an example, the Oceana Director states: “the EU rejected one more time calls for the sustainable management of fishing in Atlantic waters. Catch limits exceed scientific advice; (. . .) it is environmentally and economically foolish, and should not be ignored by society.” He concludes by saying that “four out of ten species in Atlantic waters are overexploited, particularly cod in the Celtic Sea and Scotland, and haddock in South Ireland.”21

Conclusions Seas are vulnerable and sensitive. We need to put into practice recommendations and actions aimed at reducing excesses and reaching constant improvements in key ecosystem variables. The World Bank determined that better management of world fisheries could generate around 8,300 million dollars on top of the total income generated by commercial fishing.22 That is why these wake-up calls to implement management policies for sustainable fishing are so necessary; in essence, since they contribute to the good health of marine ecosystems, they also guarantee the economic sustainability of businesses and they greatly benefit coastal communities. Continuous changes and transformations in production units and in fishing equipment and infrastructure, both in the extraction and in the industrialization

20 EU Fisheries Council, December 18, 19, 2018. 21 Oceana, Joint NGO Recommendations. 22 World Bank, The Sunken Billions Revisited.

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and distribution fields, exert pressure on the marine environment and directly affect sustainable balance. A total consensus on the optimal way to exploit resources is not easy to reach.23 Yet there are specific agreements on some common interests: a) a decrease in stock is not necessarily irreversible; b) uncertainty about the situation of the resources and about the environmental process that controls the decrease of fish populations has occasionally led to some inappropriate scientific advice; c) most overfishing cases are due to the lack of support for the scientific recommendations. There is invariably tension between social goals and economic purposes. Controversy over individual economic rationality and collective rationality is constant and makes fishing management difficult. Throughout the definition and implementation of the CFP, institutional weakness and fragility has been evident. That implies a lack of accurate goals concerning the scope and promptness for the implementation of management and technical measures, lack of coordination and coherence between the main goals, and, above all, lack of coordination among the member states when it comes to surveillance, monitoring, and penalties. As WWF says, “five years after the new common fisheries policy came into force, the balance is negative.”24 EU member states still have a long way to go to fulfill their objectives for sustainable fishing management and biodiversity conservation by the year 2020. Among the 46 plans of action for sustainable fishing management, only one has been fulfilled by all states – the creation of an administrative system to register fishing vessels. Half of the measures have been fulfilled only partially.25 In short, the pace to implement CFP must speed up. There are four aspects that contribute to explaining why the path to sustainable fishing is so slow. Structural policy is the first reason. Multi-Annual Guidance Programs (MAGPs) contributed to a bigger vessel capacity, without making proper adjustments either in line with TAC, or with quota allocations. This led to some disproportionate actions, with numerous programs to build and modernize fishing fleets inadequately implemented. Second, there is a lack of coordination in TAC distribution and quota allocations. A biomass increase does not always lead to a quota increase; in the same way, when quotas are being

23 Froese et al, “Status and Rebuilding.” 24 WWF, Evaluating Europe´s Course. 25 WWF, Evaluating Europe´s Course.

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reduced for several years, this does not really imply a biomass increase in the following year. In other words, there is no clear correlation in this respect.26 Third, it is possible to find cases in which TAC allocations and quotas above biological levels are approved,27 which contravenes basic principles. Finally, some of the procedures and measures continue to be the same due to custom and practice, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant, which is the basis of the path-dependence theory in fishing activity. This occurs when fishermen´s failure to comply with the law does not prevent them from carrying on with their activities, and nor does it entail change in the CFP.28 European Commission documents and STECF reports show that overfishing is still ongoing, and that the EU is far from reaching CFP goals in terms of population recovery. Criticism and wake-up calls are constant. The last ones, included in Oceana report, reveal that if resources were appropriately managed, in ten years, fish landings could increase by 56 percent (equivalent to 5 million tons), which would result in an income and employment increase for the region. To sum up, it is going to be difficult to stop overexploitation before 2020. That is why the European Commission needs to resist pressures that will weaken, postpone or ignore the goals set by the CFP. In turn, the European Commission should implement other management tools to guarantee sustainability and precautionary principles.

Bibliography Alverson, Dayton, Mark Freeberg, J. G. Pope and Steven Murawski. A Global Assessment of Fisheries By-catch and Discards. FAO Fisheries Technical Papers 1339. Rome, 1994. Branch, Trevor A., Olaf P. Jensen, Daniel Ricard, Yimin Ye, and Ray Hilborn. “Contrasting Global Trends in Marine Fishery Status Obtained from Catches and from Stocks Assessments.” Conservation Biology, 2011. Carpenter, Griffin, and Richard Kleinjans. Landing the Blame: Overfishing in EU Waters 2001–2015. London: New Economic Foundation, 2015. Cashion, Tim, Dalal Al-Abdulrazazzak, Dyhia Belhabib, Brittany Derrick, Esther Divovich, Dimitrios Moutpoulos, Simon-Luc Noël, Maria Palomares, Lidia C. L. Thec, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly. “Reconstructing Global Marine Fishing Gear Use: Catches and Landed Values by Gear Type and Sector.” Fisheries Research 206 (2018): 57–64.

26 Villasante, “Overfishing and Common Fisheries Policy.” 27 Carpenter and Kleinjans, Landing the Blame. 28 Palmero and González-Laxe, “Path-dependence.”

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Costello, Christopher, Daniel Ovando, Ray Hilborn, Steven Gaines, Olivier Deschenes, and Sarah E. Lester. “Status and Solutions for the World´s Unassessed Fisheries.” Science 338 (2012): 517–520. FAO. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014: Opportunities and challenges. Rome, 2014. FAO. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018. Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. Rome, 2018. Froese, Rainer, Henning Winker, Gianpaolo Coro, Nazli Demirel, Athanassios Tskliras, Donna Dimarchopoulou, Giuseppe Scarcella, Martin Quaas, and Nele Matz-Lück. “Status and Rebuilding of European Fisheries.” Marine Policy 93 (2018): 159–170. González-Laxe, Fernando. “Dysfunctions in Common Fishing Regulations.” Marine Policy 34 (2010): 182–188. Gordon, H. Scott. “The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery.” Journal of Political Economy 62 (1954): 124–142. Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. Hilborn, Ray, J. M. (Lobo) Orensanz, and Ana M. Parma. “Institutions, Incentives and the Future of Fisheries.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences 360 (2005): 47–57. Hilborn, Ray. “Biodiversity Loss in the Ocean: How Bad Is It?” Science 316 (2007): 1281–1282. Hilborn, Ray, and Daniel Ovando. “Reflections on the Success of Traditional Fisheries Management.” ICES Journal of Marine Sciences 71 (2014): 1040–1046. Khalilian, Setareh, Rainer Froese, Alexander Proells, and Till Requate. “Designed for Failure: a Critique of the CFP of European Union.” Marine Policy 34 (2010): 1178–1182. Lequesne, Christian. L´Europe bleue: A quoi sert une politique communautaire de la pêche? Paris: Press de Science Po, 2001. Mulvaney, Kieran. Inverser le courant: Mettre fin à la surpêche en Europe du Nord-Ouest. PEW, 2015. Oceana. Joint NGO Recommendations on Fishing Opportunities for 2019. December, 2018. Palmero, Federico Martín, and Fernando González-Laxe. “Path-dependence in European Fisheries Management.” European Journal of Government and Economics 7 (2018): 138–153. Pauly, Daniel, Villy Christensen, Sylvie Guénette, Tony J. Pitcher, U. Rashid Sumaila, Carl J. Walters, Reg Watson, and Dirk Zeller. “Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries.” Nature 418 (2002): 689–695. Pauly, Daniel, Reg Watson, and Jackie Alder. “Global Trends in World Fisheries Impacts on Marine Ecosystems and Food Security.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences 360 (2005): 5–12. Pauly, Daniel, and Dirk Zeller. “Catch Reconstructions Reveal that Global Marine Fisheries Catches are Higher than Reported and Declining.” Nature Communication 7 (2016): 10244. Pauly, Daniel, and Dirk Zeller. “Comments on FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA 2016).” Marine Policy 77 (2017): 176–181. Poseidon Aquatic Resources Management Ltd. Taking Stock: Progress Towards Ending Overfishing in the Europe Union. Pew Charitable Trust, 2017. Ramírez-Llodra, Eva, Paul Tyler, Maria Baker, Odd Aksel Bergstad, Malcolm R. Clark, Elva Escobar, Lisa A. Levin, Lenaick Menot, Ashley A. Rowden, Craig R. Smith, and Cindy

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L. Van Dover. “Man and the Last Great Wilderness: Human Impact on the Deep Sea.” PLoS One 6. nº 8 (2011). Schaefer, Milner B., “Some Aspects of the Dynamics of Populations Important to the Management of the Commercial Marine Fisheries.” InterAmerican Tropical Tuna Commission 1 (1954): 27–56. Scientific Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF). Monitoring the Performance of the Common Fisheries Policy. STECF-17-04 (2017). https://stecf.jcr.ec.eu rope.eu/documents/43805/55543/STECF+17-04+-+Monitoring+the+CFP.pdf. Villasante, Sebastian, Maria Carme García-Negro, Fernando González-Laxe, and Gonzalo Rodríguez. “Overfishing and Common Fisheries Policy: (Un)successful Results from TAC regulation?” Fish and Fisheries 12 (2011): 34–50. Watson, Reg, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly. “Primary Productivity Demands of Global Fishing Fleets.” Fish and Fisheries 15 (2014): 231–241. World Bank. The Sunken Billions Revisited: Progress and Challenges in Global Marine Fisheries. Washington DC, 2017. Worm, Boris, Ray Hilborn, Julia K. Baum, Trevor A. Branch, Jeremy S. Collie, Christoper Costello, Michael J. Fogarty, Elisabeth Falton, Jeffrey A. Hutchins, Simon Jennings, Olef P. Jensen, Heike K. Loetze, Pamela M. Mace, Tim R. McClanahan, Cólin Minto, Stephen R. Palumbi, Ana M. Parma, Daniel Ricardi, Andrew A. Rosenberg, Reg Watson, and Dirk Zeller (2009). “Rebuilding Global Fisheries.” Science 325 (2009): 578–585. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Evaluating Europe´s Course to Sustainable Fisheries by 2020. Brussels, 2018. Zeller, Dirk, Tim Cashion, Maria Palomares, and Daniel Pauly. “Reconstructing Global Marine Fishing Gear Use: a Synthesis of Reconstructed Data.” Fish and Fisheries 19 (2018): 30–39.

Gonçalo Carvalho

8 Towards Ending Overfishing in the European Atlantic: The Role of Environmental Organizations The work of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) on fisheries issues in Europe, especially since the 2000s, is multiple and diverse. It embraces many issues that are dealt with in Brussels, where the governing bodies of the European Union (EU) are located, and also throughout the coastal member states of the EU. This chapter will focus on the part that ENGOs have played at a European level on the policies and bodies that define how Europe’s fisheries are managed. According to Lado,1 the role of ENGOs is crucial and still growing. In today’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), ENGOs are a major player due to the influence they exert on the legislators. How did this come to be? And how can it be maintained, diversified or enhanced in the future? These are the basic questions that will be addressed in this chapter. Three main sources of information have been used: the secondary sources listed in the bibliography; the personal observations of the author during ten years of work in policy and advocacy in European fisheries; and a series of interviews with activists and other close observers of the environmental organisations. The interviewees were selected by the author because they have worked in various capacities since the 1980s in ENGOs devoted to fisheries issues, foundations that have supported environmental organizations in their fisheries work, or public institutions dealing directly with environmental organizations on fisheries issues.2

First Interactions Environmental organizations started working on fisheries indirectly due to their interests in sensitive and iconic species, such as seals and whales. Many activists, and some of the ENGOs, became involved through anti-whaling campaigns. One organization, in particular, seems to have been the first to deal

1 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy. 2 The interviewees will remain anonymous. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-009

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with fisheries and related issues in the North Atlantic. This was Greenpeace, which was mentioned by several interviewees who had started their careers with that organization. Indeed, Greenpeace International, or one of its national offices, was responsible for the first fisheries campaigns, which focused on iconic marine mammals, notably seals and whales. Initially, in the 1970s, the objective was to ban hunting of these species, but gradually the campaigns, during the late 1970s and 1980s, evolved into fisheries-marine mammals’ interaction campaigns. One of the interviewees stated that Greenpeace’s focus on fisheries issues was the direct result of interactions with key researchers, notably Sydney Holt. In the late 1980s, the organization started to focus on the prohibition of destructive fishing gear. The first to be targeted was the large-scale drift net, due to its capacity to inflict indiscriminate killing of marine life on a massive scale. This campaign, like those concerning marine mammals, tended to concentrate on the international level, at institutions such as the United Nations and the International Whaling Commission (IWC), usually to secure bans or moratoriums that were eventually implemented or followed up in specific countries. The North Atlantic – due to its pivotal location in the world’s geopolitical dynamics, and because it was the area with the longest running industrial fisheries – was, of course, centre stage. Having started in North America, the initial focus of Greenpeace’s marine work was more on the Western part of the Atlantic. One of the interviewees stated that the work on large-scale drift nets flagged the importance of working with the EU on fisheries issues, especially from the moment that Portugal and Spain joined the EU in 1986, which effectively turned the Union into a major stakeholder in fisheries. Another alarm bell sounded when the inclusion of these two countries in the EU led to the establishment of quotas that exceeded the levels based on scientific advice in the NAFO area, which was legal, but considered to be dangerous. These two instances may have been at the root of Greenpeace’s engagement in the EU’s CFP, namely in the 1992 reform. According to the same interviewee, in those days Greenpeace, which was the only organization working on these issues, focused on the Commission and on getting the CFP to recognize that scientific evidence should be the basis for setting fishing opportunities. During the 1990s, the realization that fisheries had a huge impact on the health of marine ecosystems, and that the majority of fish stocks in the North Eastern Atlantic were overfished, was becoming ever clearer from the mounting weight of scientific reports. And so, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, several other organizations started to join Greenpeace in its work on fisheries, notably on issues such as Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, trawling gears and iconic species such as tunas and sharks, in the North Atlantic in

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general, but increasingly on the European side. According to one of the interviewees, the dissatisfaction of the environmental organizations with the outcomes of the 1992 CFP reform was also one of the key reasons for their engagement with the issue and, most importantly, with the 2002 reform, where the fight to end overfishing started to play a key role in their work.

The 2000s: The Rise of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations Among the best evidence of the recognition of the role of the Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs) as a relevant stakeholder in fisheries is their inclusion as full members of the Advisory Committee for Fisheries and Aquaculture (ACFA) in 1999.3 This also marks the beginning of the engagement of environmental organizations with the advisory bodies to the European Commission and the member states and, as such, represents a defining step in the direction of being integrated into the policymaking processes of European fisheries, rather than just observing them from the outside. Several of the interviewees mentioned the engagement of the ENGOs in ACFA as pivotal in their role in the fisheries arena in the EU. Some mentioned the difficulties they experienced in the very unbalanced consultative body, with ENGOs having a maximum of three of the 20 to 30 seats. But they all mentioned how important it was, both in terms of the integration of environmental aspects in the policies being developed by the European Commission, and in respect of the evolution of consultative bodies on fisheries issues under the CFP. And so, when the 2002 CFP reform came about, there were several ENGOs active in Brussels on fisheries issues – namely Greenpeace, Birdlife, WWF, and Seas at Risk (an exclusively European marine organisation) – and with numerous official channels to access the European Commission. While several of the interviewees, as well as other ENGO representatives, were engaged in the process – mainly in interactions with the Directorate General of European Commission responsible for fisheries – at that stage there was limited coordination between the ENGOs. According to the European Commission (2009), the main changes made to the CFP in 2002 included an “increased commitment to ensure the integration

3 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy.

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of environmental concerns into fisheries management.” However, the interviewees were clear and unanimous in their belief that this commitment was not ambitious enough and the CFP after this reform would neither deliver sustainable stocks nor contribute to healthy marine ecosystems. Perhaps one of the most positive results of the 2002 reform was the establishment of the Regional Advisory Councils (RACs),4 whose purpose was to increase stakeholder engagement in CFP implementation. They were intended to build on the work of ACFA in the context of the regionalization – or decentralization – of the CFP. They were initiated after the reformed version of the CFP came into force in 2004, covering the different geographical areas of EU waters and specific fields of competence, such as the EU fleets that operated outside EU waters (see Figure 8.1). Most importantly for the ENGOs, the regulations stated that one-third of the representatives in each RAC should be from “other interest groups” and not the fishing industry (subsequently changed to 40 percent in the 2012 CFP reform). This meant that there was now a specific call on the ENGOs – and other groups, such as consumer organizations and recreational fishermen – to become members of these stakeholder forums and have a bigger say in advising the European Commission and the member states on the implementation of the CFP. According to Dunn,5 the clear purpose of the RACs (the official denomination was changed in the 2012 reform to simply Advisory Councils [ACs]) was to advise the European Commission on specific measures under the CFP. Moreover, an equally tangible outcome was the development of a working relationship and regular dialogue – however challenging it often was – between the ENGOs and the fishing industry. Since the effective start of the (R)ACs in 2005, the ENGOs have been increasing their engagement as members of the different ACs. This required a fundamental change in the role that they were used to playing in fisheries – from a purely “whistle-blowing” role to a more inclusive one, in which they have to go in depth into the specificities of the application of the regulations in the ocean and on board the fishing vessels. Several interviewees mentioned this change as one of the most significant that the ENGOs have undergone in recent times. According to Dunn, at least some industry members were surprised by the technical knowledge the ENGOs could provide.6 And although the interactions in many of the ACs are still quite conflictual, overall they have contributed to a much greater and more positive dialogue between the stakeholders. Also, several of the interviewees and the author recognize that the work of the ACs has

4 European Council, Council Decision of 19 July 2004 Establishing Regional Advisory Councils. 5 Dunn, “Euan Dunn.” 6 Dunn, “Euan Dunn.”

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Figure 8.1: European Union waters and the geographical remit of the fisheries advisory councils. Source: DG-MARE (https://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/facts_figures_en).

contributed to a change in the perception of the role of the ENGOs by the Commission and by some member states of the EU, which are also regular participants (as observers) in the audience of the ACs. It is also important to mention that in the 2000s, several ENGOs, both international, such as WWF and Birdlife, and national, developed several in situ projects in fisheries communities across Europe, often focused on small scale or artisanal fisheries. These contributed significantly, not only to the development of a different relationship between environmental organizations and fishermen, but also to changes in the perception of many stakeholders, namely decision makers, of the role that ENGOs can play in the quest for sustainable fisheries.

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Several interviewees mentioned the importance of other marine conservation campaigns during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in which environmental organizations worked collectively in order to achieve important changes in legislation that had a direct impact on fisheries and their sustainability. Among those mentioned were the campaign to end shark finning and the overfishing of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean, the work around the EU fishing fleet operating outside EU waters, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and the Birds and Habitats Directives. These also helped shape the way the ENGOs operated together and were perceived by the other stakeholders in Brussels and beyond.

All Hands on Deck: The 2012 Common Fisheries Policy Reform The European Commission started the process of revising the CFP by publishing a Green Paper in 2009. By this time, it was not only clear that this would be a crucial reform, but also that the ENGOs and civil society would play a very important role in it. The process culminated in the 2012 CFP reform. Many factors contributed to this reform. First of all, there was clear scientific and statistical evidence that the 2002 CFP reform had failed to provide the basis for sound fisheries management. Quite the opposite – it had served as a driver for overcapacity and overfishing. This was made clear by several interviewees, and some published sources,7 but most importantly by the European Commission itself, as clearly stated in the Green Paper.8 Secondly, the EU had signed in 2002 the Johannesburg agreement on sustainable fisheries under the Framework of the United Nations, in which it had committed to manage its fish stocks in line with Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) by 2015 at the latest. But the third and perhaps most important factor was that the legislative process would for the first time take place under co-decision. This meant that the European Parliament would be actively engaged in the decision-making process and not just as a spectator, almost an advisory body, as it had been until then. This change came about as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in December 2009. Of these three contributory factors, the last two are not

7 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy. 8 European Commission, Green Paper: Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy.

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only clearly mentioned in the literature,9 but were also invoked by many of the interviewees. According to Lado, co-decision was the main change that the Lisbon Treaty brought to the CFP, with repercussions that are still to be fully understood.10 But for the ENGOs it was clear that the inclusion of the European Parliament as an active player in the legislative process provided them with the opportunity to be much more engaged, taken into consideration and, eventually, to exert considerable influence over the outcome of what would be the next CFP. According to Orach, this realization and the work focused on the European Parliament were, from the ENGOs’ point of view, crucial for the final outcome of the 2012 reform.11 And of course, by 2009 the environmental organizations had built up their capacity and understanding of the processes at EU level in order to take full part in the CFP reform. Several of the interviewees mentioned also that by 2009 several ENGO representatives had established good relationships with people in the European institutions, which proved to be important in adding to the institutional recognition of the ENGOs as stakeholders. The interviewees also mentioned another factor that contributed to the setting of a scenario favorable for a substantial reform of the CFP, one in which the ENGOs could play an important role. And this was the early recognition by three groups of stakeholders of the shortcomings of the CFP up to that time in dealing with overfishing of European fish stocks, given that the ENGOs’ engagement in the 2012 reform could be key in changing this trend. And these three stakeholders were, respectively: the European Commission, notably through the Commissioners in charge of fisheries before and during the reform, Jo Borg and Maria Damanaki; the private charitable funders who supported the ENGOs; and, perhaps most importantly, the general public. And while the mounting scientific evidence seemed to have been decisive for the first two agencies, a series of television documentaries – notably “Hugh’s Fish Fight” against the practice of discarding dead fish12– and news reports seemed to have been most significant for the general public. These three factors are recognized, at least partially, in the works of Lado, Orach, and Dunn.13 These three sources, and all of the interviewees, are unanimous in identifying the key to the success of the ENGOs in influencing the

9 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy; Orach, “Tracing a Pathway to Success.” 10 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy. 11 Orach, “Tracing a Pathway to Success.” 12 Fearnley-Whittingstall, “Hugh’s Fish Fight.” 13 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy; Orach, “Tracing a Pathway to Success”; Dunn, “Euan Dunn.”

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outcome of the 2012 CFP reform: coordination. Not only between the organizations working in Brussels, but also throughout the EU member states. And at the heart of this coordination was OCEAN2012, a coalition created in 2009 to support a fundamental reform of the CFP. It was launched by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, the Fisheries Secretariat, the New Economics Foundation, and Seas At Risk, which were later joined on the Steering Group by Ecologistas en Acción. Within five years, the coalition grew to 193 member groups in 24 EU member states and beyond. It included fishermen’s organizations, leading marine scientists, development agencies, ENGOs, aquaria, consumer, and development organizations, restaurants, and groups that shared an interest in sustainable fisheries.14 Although the larger, international, and more experienced ENGOs – Greenpeace, Birdlife, WWF and OCEANA, which had already been doing fisheries work in Brussels – were not part of OCEAN2012 itself, they collaborated with the coalition with regard to the 2012 CFP reform, mainly through their national offices in key EU member states. One of the interviewees stated: “ENGOs were able to build an umbrella to channel these voices more in a joint direction and to build more of this homogeneous group of actors, diverse but still united in their demands.” Another interviewee added that the ENGOs were able “to make some technical proposals about how the law could be improved . . . but also created an environment for decision makers to take bolder decisions with respect to overfishing.” For several interviewees the fact that the different ENGOs within this collaboration divided the work among themselves, taking advantage of their specific expertise and style of operating in a very synergetic way, was a clear success. From an environmental point of view, there are many improvements in the 2012 CFP reform, including some that have had a direct impact on fishing at sustainable levels or, from another angle, on ending overfishing. And while multiannual plans, the discard ban, and access to quota measures are mentioned by Orach and some of the interviewees as important aspects,15 to these and authors such as Lado,16 the key outcome of the 2012 CFP reform process is the definition of fishing at MSY as the legally binding objective of the fisheries management of the EU, as captured in Article 2.2: The CFP shall apply the precautionary approach to fisheries management, and shall aim to ensure that exploitation of living marine biological resources restores and maintains populations of harvested species above levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield.

14 Pew Charitable Trusts. “Archived Project – OCEAN2012.” 15 Orach, “Tracing a Pathway to Success.” 16 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy.

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In order to reach the objective of progressively restoring and maintaining populations of fish stocks above biomass levels capable of producing maximum sustainable yield, the maximum sustainable yield exploitation rate shall be achieved by 2015 where possible and, on a progressive, incremental basis at the latest by 2020 for all stocks.17

It is important to point out that although the MSY concept has been challenged by many researchers and stakeholders, it has been widely recognized as a balanced fisheries management goal, ensuring not only environmental sustainability, but also economic and social sustainability. This is clearly why it was adopted in the context of the United Nations and now by the European Union. This is also why the ENGOs, and definitely the interviewees, believe that this was a goal worth pursuing and an achievement to be celebrated.

A Long and Winding Road: Implementing the 2012 CFP Reform It is safe to say that most of the ENGOs thought that after securing a clear, legally binding objective, and with clear deadlines in place, the end to overfishing would be reached relatively quickly, especially considering that the legislation was adopted consensually by the three European institutions. It is clear at this stage that this assumption was wrong. This statement is not only the perception of the author, but of all the interviewees. Again focusing on sustainable fishing levels, it is the European Commission’s independent scientific body, the Scientific, Technical, and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF), that states in its latest evaluation of the implementation of the CFP that progress towards attaining objectives is too slow: “many stocks are still overexploited in the North East Atlantic, and that the rate of progress has slowed in the last few years.”18 Why is this? As stated by one of the interviewees, the reason might be simple: “we managed to change stuff on paper and we managed to get quite a lot of public attention for that campaign, but that does not change the culture for decision-making in something like the Fisheries Council.” Indeed, the problem might reside in the fact that the final decision on setting the majority of fishing limits in the EU resides solely with the European Council. A thorough analysis of the implications of this can be found in a report published

17 European Union. REGULATION (EU) No 1380/201. 18 STECF, European Union. REGULATION (EU) No 1380/201.

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in 2016 by Transparency International (2019).19 Orach also refers to the Council as the “last stronghold” of the fisheries industry groups.20 Although it focuses on the implementation of the Landing Obligation, additional insights into the delays and detours from the path clearly set out by the CFP are provided by Borges et al.: additional policy changes not originally foreseen in the CFP, reluctance from the fisheries industry, and some of the EU member states, to implement the legislation, and insufficient monitoring and control.21 Although responsibility for the delays in achieving the end of overfishing encompassed by the CFP relies solely with the decision makers, some of the interviewees also suggest that the weakening of the ENGO and civil society movement momentum that was created around the reform might be facilitating this scenario. One of the limitations specified by several of the interviewees relates to the fact that the environmental organizations are much more geared up for policy reform processes than for the implementation of these policies. Also, the resources and expertise needed for the implementation phase are much wider and more diverse than those required for the policy reform stage. And while it is true that many of the ENGOs that engaged in the reform have continued to work in the implementation phase, it is also true that some have reduced or even stopped their activity in this regard. Nevertheless, writing in 2019, the author believes that the legal obligation of fishing below MSY by 2020 at the latest will be achieved, mostly because it only requires the European member states to take the right decision, in line with the scientific advice, in the context of the European Council.

The Future: Ensuring a Permanent End to Overfishing (and Beyond . . . ) Beyond the actual results obtained, this chapter had the objective of documenting the role of the ENGOs in European fisheries, and in ending overfishing in the European Atlantic in particular. Besides the various accounts provided by the interviewees, several researchers have underlined the importance of having the environmental organizations actively engaged in this field. According to

19 Transparency International. “Overfishing in the Darkness.” 20 Orach, “Tracing a Pathway to Success.” 21 Borges, Conflicts and Trade-offs.

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Lado, ENGOs “have become a fundamental stakeholder in the CFP. The fact that some of them hire fisheries experts . . . is the best indicator that they are here to stay as fisheries stakeholders and that they want to exert their influence on the basis of a technically sound set of arguments.”22 Taking into consideration the insights and views provided by the interviewees, here are a few key points on what is needed for the successful continuation of engagement by the ENGOs in EU fisheries in the coming years: Coordination and Permanent Dialogue among ENGOs: this has been a key factor in the success of ENGOs, not only in fisheries but throughout the broad range of issues on which they work. Although coordination among EU ENGOs on fisheries has continued, since 2014 it has changed due to external as well as internal pressures. The level achieved during the 2012 reform of the CFP is the one to which the ENGOs should aspire. Adapting and Increasing Capacity and Expertise in the ENGOs: as pointed out by several of the interviewees, the implementation of a policy like the CFP is a long-lasting engagement, and one that requires a diverse set of skills and human resources, supported by considerable funding. The organizations must take on this commitment fully. Maintaining Independence and an “Edge”: several of the interviewees and key published works believe that the transition from a purely “whistle-blowing” outsider role into an effective stakeholder, part of the decision-making processes and institutions, was a very positive change. But it also brings the risk of “locking” the ENGOS into processes and decisions that they would not have agreed to previously. The environmental organizations need to find a very delicate balance between these two roles/positions, on the one hand continuing to be a constructive party in the policymaking process, but on the other not being afraid to challenge the status quo and advocating more systemic change. The author believes that this is a realistic objective, which may be attainable through the fulfilment of each ENGO’s portfolio of projects and campaigns, but should definitely be accomplished by bringing to bear the diversity of approaches, profiles, and structures of the ENGO community. This entails maintaining the independence and capacity of the ENGOS to create and manage their own agenda, not only from overall “trends,” but very specifically in terms of funders’ agendas and priorities, both public and private. Avery-Gomm et al.

22 Lado, Common Fisheries Policy.

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provide a perceptive insight into this challenge in their appraisal of the plastic pollution of the marine environment.23 Recognition from Other Stakeholders and Sharing the Vision: although more and more stakeholders, as well as society in general, are realising that the ENGOs have evolved, both the author and several of the interviewees consider that there are still too many misconceptions and lack of understanding of what they effectively are today. ENGOs are here for the long run as part of the solution. They have technical expertise and they know that long-lasting environmental sustainability will be impossible without also ensuring economic and social sustainability. At the heart of this is a simple, but perhaps understated assertion: if turned into reality, the vision of the ENGOs is one that will benefit all of humankind. Of course this might only be fully attainable in a medium to longterm scenario, and some sectors and communities will have to undergo significant change. But ethically and ideologically the present vision of the ENGOs, and definitely those working on EU fisheries, is one that would benefit all stakeholders and society in general. In light of the surging – and each day more difficult to deny – climate urgency scenario we are currently facing, embracing fully with the ENGO’s vision may be more than an option. It seems more and more to be the only option that will ensure the survival of humankind. Acknowledgments: The author is extremely grateful to the interviewees and also to Alexandra Braz, who was responsible for the transcriptions of the interviews. And always – SGPS.

Bibliography Avery-Gomm, S., T. Walker, M. Mallory, and J. Provenche. “There is Nothing Convenient about Plastic Pollution: Rejoinder to Stafford and Jones ‘Viewpoint – Ocean Plastic Pollution: A Convenient but Distracting Truth?’” Marine Policy 106 (August 2019). https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103552. Borges, L., K. Nielsen, K. Frangoudes, C. Armstrong, and M. Borit. Conflicts and Trade-offs in Implementing the CFP Discard Policy. DiscardLess Deliverable Report 7.3,5 (2018). Dunn, E. “Euan Dunn.” In Marine Conservation: People, Ideas and Action, edited by Bob Earll. Exeter: Pelagic Publishing, 2018. European Commission. Green Paper: Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. Brussels, 2009.

23 Avery-Gomm et al., “There is Nothing Convenient about Plastic Pollution.”

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European Council. Council Decision of 19 July 2004 Establishing Regional Advisory Councils under the Common Fisheries Policy (2004/585/EC). OJEU L 256, 17–22. Luxembourg, 2004. European Union. REGULATION (EU) No 1380/2013 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 December 2013 on the Common Fisheries Policy, amending Council Regulations (EC) No 1954/2003 and (EC) No 1224/2009 and repealing Council Regulations (EC) No 2371/2002 and (EC) No 639/2004 and Council Decision 2004/585/EC. OJEU 354/ 22, 22–61. Luxembourg, 2013. Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. “Hugh’s Fish Fight.” Television documentary series, UK: Channel 4, 2011. Lado, Ernesto P. The Common Fisheries Policy: The Quest for Sustainability. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2016. Orach, K., M. Schlüter, and H. Österblom. “Tracing a Pathway to Success: How Competing Interest Groups Influenced the 2013 EU Common Fisheries Policy Reform.” Environmental Science & Policy 76 (2017): 90–102. Pew Charitable Trusts. “Archived Project – OCEAN2012.” Accessed May 20, 2019. https:// www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/archived-projects/ocean2012. Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF). Monitoring the Performance of the Common Fisheries Policy (STECF-Adhoc-19-01). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2019. doi:10.2760/22641, JRC116446. Transparency International. “Overfishing in the Darkness: a Case Study on Transparency in Council Decision-making.” Accessed May 20, 2019. https://transparency.eu/wp-content/up loads/2016/10/21-09-2016-Fishing-report-web.pdf.

Rod Cappell and Fiona Nimmo

9 Sustainable European Fisheries: Are We There Yet? Progress and Challenges for Fisheries Management The North Atlantic is bordered by Member States of the European Union and independent coastal states including the United States of America (US), Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and the United Kingdom (UK). These states are all signatories to the 1995 United Nations (UN) Fish Stocks Agreement,1 which requires that they co-operate to ensure the long-term conservation and sustainable use of straddling and highly migratory fish stocks. These stocks may occur within or outside their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), extend into those of neighbouring states, or beyond the EEZs. Stocks extending into international waters are overseen by Regional Fishery Management Organisations (RFMOs), which for the North Atlantic are the North West Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (NAFO), the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT). These agencies coordinate the management of fisheries resources by the coastal states, and by other fishing nations, such as Russia and Korea, which fish in international waters. This chapter examines the management of fisheries in Atlantic Europe, focusing on co-operative efforts to avoid overfishing through agreements and annual negotiations that depend on sound scientific advice being available and heeded. The European Union (EU) of 27 Member States includes 22 coastal states, nine of which border the North East Atlantic and North Sea (Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden). European Union Member States have managed fisheries with common rules since 1970. These rules were expanded and set within the framework of a Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 1983,2 which has been reviewed and revised every decade since: 1. The first CFP (1983) focused on access and the share of the resources between Member States. This was complicated by a changing Union: Greenland, no longer part of Denmark, left the EU in 1985, while two major fishing nations, Spain and Portugal, joined in 1986. The first shared quotas set some catch

1 An “Agreement on the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of December 10, 1982 relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks.” December 4, 1995. 2 Churchill and Owens, EC Common Fisheries Policy. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110641738-010

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limits, but for many stocks scientific advice was either not available or not followed. Clear signs of overfishing were all too evident as catches of key commercial species such as North Sea cod (Gadus morhua) continued to decline, but the EU fleet continued to expand in terms of the number of vessels and the size and power of those vessels. 2. The second CFP (1992) recognized the problem caused by additional fishing capacity and sought to tackle overfishing by reducing the EU fleet through expensive scrapping schemes and providing subsidies to mitigate the social impact of lost fishing opportunities. 3. The third CFP (2002) acknowledged that these measures had not been effective and introduced extensive reforms, adopting much of the language and commitment to sustainability set out in the UN’s World Summit on Sustainable Development (the Johannesburg Declaration) that same year.3 It also introduced some positive developments, such as the intent to develop Long Term Management Plans (LTMP) and more joined-up enforcement between member states. Moreover, the third CFP recognized the failure of the “one size fits all” fisheries policy and adopted a more regionalized approach by establishing Regional Advisory Councils. Despite these changes, many European fisheries continued to be in a poor state and showed signs of overfishing. 4. The fourth CFP (2013) formally committed the EU to achieving exploitation rates of marine biological resources at or below Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) and the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 to effectively regulate harvesting and end overfishing by 2020 (FAO 2018). Exploiting fish stocks at or below MSY allows them to be maintained or recover to healthy levels, providing food for consumers while contributing to important ecosystem and marine food web functions.4 The target date set to achieve exploitation rates at MSY was 2015 or, where this was not possible, no later than 2020. As we approach the 2020 deadline, 25 years on from the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, we ask: “how has the EU progressed towards ending overfishing? Are we there yet?” This chapter contends that it is not always clear how close we are to achieving the goal to end overfishing, partly because it is not agreed where “there” actually is, and partly due to ongoing and emerging challenges in reaching that long sought after destination of sustainable fisheries.

3 http://www.un-documents.net/jburgdec.htm. 4 Nimmo and Cappell, Taking Stock.

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Managing European Atlantic Fish Stocks Managing fisheries sustainably is an adaptive process that relies on sound science, innovative management approaches, effective enforcement, meaningful partnerships, and robust public participation.5 It has long been recognized that a collaborative approach is required to deliver sound science for the Atlantic, which spans numerous coastal states and international waters. The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) was established in 1902 by eight coastal states (Denmark, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and United Kingdom) to be that collaborative scientific body and was formally constituted by convention in 1964. ICES covers a convention area that is the Atlantic Ocean and its adjacent seas, but is primarily concerned with the Northeast Atlantic.6 The Copenhagen Declaration was signed by the then 20 member countries of ICES during its centenary in 2002, “to reaffirm their commitment to maintain ICES as a strong and independent scientific organisation in order to improve its capacity to give unbiased, sound, reliable, and credible scientific advice on human activities affecting, and affected by, marine ecosystems.” The Declaration also sought to strengthen working relationships with the main users of its scientific information: the EU, independent coastal states, and the RFMOs. Each year these users ask ICES to provide scientific advice on important commercial stocks in the North-East Atlantic and other related matters. ICES Working Groups, composed of fisheries scientists from the states that participate in the fisheries concerned, collate data from the fishing nations and conduct stock assessments. ICES also formulates scientific advice in response to the states’ requests, which can be on specific issues that arise, as well as advice on the recommended levels of fishing to achieve the desired outcome, i.e. to achieve MSY.7 Although Atlantic fishing nations have committed to basing management on sound science, this still remains open to interpretation; for example, to what extent should economic and social factors be included within the “science”? And there is still room for political influence within many of these management processes; for example, setting Total Allowable Catches (TACs) in the EU remains a process involving the EU Council of Ministers.

5 NOAA Fisheries, Status of Stocks. 6 NAFO’s Scientific Council performs this function for shared stocks and some coastal stocks in the Northwest Atlantic. 7 For more details on the ICES advisory process, see: http://www.ices.dk/community/advisoryprocess/Pages/default.aspx.

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Shares of the EU’s TAC allocated to its Member States are based on a fixed allocation key that was established early in the history of the CFP, reflecting fishing patterns in the early 1980s.8 Each Member State allocates its share of the EU TAC according to its own governance system. Some, such as Denmark, introduced Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) systems that allow fishers to buy and sell their fishing rights associated with each stock. Others, such as Ireland, retain the fishing rights centrally and set monthly fishing allocations for the fleet to ensure the national TAC is not exceeded. For stocks that extend outside EU waters, bilateral agreements on the relative share of fishing opportunities are sought between the EU and independent coastal states such as Norway. For widely distributed stocks, Coastal States Agreements (CSA) have been established to determine the share of TACs between fishing nations. This is not a straightforward process and can become highly politicized, as exemplified by Northeast Atlantic mackerel (see Box 1), which shows how difficult it is for science to keep pace with a changing marine environment and provide timely advice. Management must collectively apply that scientific advice, while the industry needs to engage with, and support, the scientific basis for management decisions. Box 1: The fall, rise (and fall?) of Northeast Atlantic mackerel Mackerel (scomber scombrus) is one of the most abundant and widely distributed commercial species in the Northeast Atlantic. Long migrations expand the population to its maximum range in the summer, when it is distributed from Morocco to Norway and from Greenland to the western Baltic Sea. The history of the Northeast Atlantic mackerel fishery provides a stark illustration of the challenges faced in managing a widely dispersed biological resource that is important to both the marine ecosystem and to humankind. Surveys in the 1950s and 1960s identified mackerel as being highly abundant in the North Sea. The resource attracted interest from new Dutch trawl and Norwegian purse-seine vessels, which overtook the traditional line and driftnet fisheries and led to a peak in North Sea landings of 900,000t in 1967.9 The increased fishing pressure led to a collapse of the North Sea spawning stock in the 1970s, which has never recovered to the levels observed in the 1960s. However, rather than this being one of three mackerel spawning components (western, southern, and North Sea) it was recently postulated that spawning distribution is more dynamic and the recruitment failure in the North Sea was in part due to environmental changes as well as high fishing pressure (Jansen, 2014). The contribution to the stock by the western spawning component has increased over the last 40 years and its distribution has expanded to the northwest (see Figure A). From 2001 to 2007, a Coastal States Agreement (CSA) signed by the EU, Norway, and Faroe Islands set a TAC that covered most of the stock. In 2008, the Faroe Islands decided to step

8 See Carpenter and Kleinjans, “‘Who gets to Fish?’” 9 Lockwood, The Mackerel.

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Figure A: Mackerel stock distribution (source: www.imr.no/temasider/fisk/makrell/makrell/en).

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out of this agreement and set its own quota. Around this time, Iceland’s interest in the mackerel fishery grew: from virtually no Icelandic mackerel fishery prior to 2005, the 2009 ICES advice showed Iceland catching over 112,000 tonnes of mackerel, contributing to a significant over shoot of the TAC. Although there appeared to be agreement on the need to follow scientific advice and an LTMP informed by that science, there was disagreement over how the TAC should be divided between the EU and coastal states. The improvement in the stock in the latter half of the 2000s exacerbated these allocation problems, as its distribution had extended into Greenland’s EEZ and the NEAFC area. The CSA negotiations reached an impasse and there was no agreement in place between 2010 and 2013. In 2014, an ad hoc agreement was reached, but this still only involved the EU, Faroes, and Norway. Iceland, Greenland (recognized as a coastal state in 2016) and Russia (catching mackerel in NEAFC’s international waters) all fish the stock without being signatories of the CSA. The CSA set aside 15.6% of the TAC to these three states as a “Coastal States and Fishing Parties Reserve”, but in 2013 they caught over 30 percent of the TAC advised by ICES and the total catch proposed in the CSA far exceeded that advised by ICES. Nevertheless, the stock remained at its full reproductive capacity, and ICES concluded that “current catch levels do not pose a threat to the stock.” The mackerel spawning stock biomass (SSB) was estimated to have increased in the late 2000s, peaking in 2011, but declining since then. The high fishing pressure (nearly twice the MSY exploitation rate in recent years), combined with low stock recruitments in 2015 and 2016, led ICES to find that SSB had gone below the MSY biomass trigger reference point (MSY Btrigger) in 2018 (ICES, 2018a). This decline was compounded when scientists reduced their previous estimates of SSB. The total catch of mackerel was expected to be over one million tonnes in 2018, exceeding ICES’ advice by about 450,000t and exceeding the TAC under the CSA. Recent stock collapses (including this very stock in the North Sea) highlight the consequences of fishers ignoring the signs, and managers not following scientific advice. However, the downturn estimated by scientists did not ring true to those fishing the stock. Fishers continued to report “super shoals” of mackerel up to 25km long and complained that the substantial catch reductions advised by ICES would have major negative economic impacts in such an important fishery. This caused fishing interests to push back against ICES’ advice. The European pelagic industry still believed in the need for science-based management and so employed scientists to review the assessment methods. The industry scientists identified potential flaws, leading ICES to re-examine those methods through a benchmarking exercise. ICES revised its advice for 2019, showing a much-improved stock status in which SSB remained above MSY Btrigger, although it still exhibited a decline. Ultimately, however, the lack of an inclusive CSA to agree catch shares between fishing nations remained a fundamental flaw in the management of Northeast Atlantic mackerel, with little likelihood of overfishing of the stock ending by the 2020 deadline.

Basing management on sound science and moving towards MSY are now wellestablished principles of good governance in Atlantic fisheries. Another principle is to take a long-term perspective through the development of LTMPs. These are beneficial as they seek to achieve and then maintain MSY over a given timeframe. They also smooth management responses by limiting annual changes in

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TACs and so reduce short-term financial shocks to fisheries operators. In 2013, the latest CFP re-defined long-term plans as Multi-Annual Plans (MAPs). Having a MAP in place reduces (without fully removing) the potential for political interference in setting annual fishing opportunities. This gives more stability and certainty, which is of economic benefit to operators. The first example of long-term planning under the EU’s CFP was the Northeast Atlantic Cod Recovery Plan, which was introduced in 2004 in response to the dire state of the stock. All fisheries catching cod were subject to highly restrictive quota and effort (days at sea) limits. Those seeking an exemption from the days at sea limits had to prove their by-catch of cod was minimal. After many years of such limits, the cod stocks in most areas had indeed recovered, with the SSB of North Sea cod increasing above Blim in 2014, and the fishery being certified as sustainable according to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard in 2017. Since 2017, assessments resulted in a downscaling of SSB and an upward revision of F. This led to the TAC being cut and the MSC certificate being suspended in 2019. The EU and Norway asked ICES what management strategies would help the cod stock to once more recover to MSY levels.10

Measuring Progress The CFP (2013) committed to “restore and maintain stock biomass above levels capable of producing MSY; achieve MSY exploitation rates; and ensure measures are in accordance with the best available scientific advice.” Progress can be measured in terms of the amount being fished from the stocks or their biomass compared to what are considered sustainable levels. This requires sufficient information on the fishing activity, and on the stock, to determine both the current status and the appropriate MSY reference points. The level of fishing is generally well reported for EU fleets due to its Data Collection Framework (DCF), but the level of information for every commercial species in every EU sea basin is far more variable. The European Commission asks its Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF), which comprises 30 to 35 experts acting independently, to report annually on progress in achieving the CFP objectives. In reporting back to the EC, the STECF reiterates the challenges it faces, not least the dynamic nature of fisheries and the associated assessment and management of

10 ICES, 2019b.

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stocks. It is not the case that the number of assessed and managed stocks has increased year-on-year; indeed, stocks managed by TAC actually decreased from 114 to 110 between 2013 and 2019. This was due to some precautionary TACs being removed to help implement the Landing Obligation, which prevents EU vessels discarding quota-managed species. Around 70 of the TAC-managed stocks had assessments with sufficient detail to allow MSY exploitation reference points (termed “analytical assessments”) to be established, although only 25 had MSY reference points in relation to their biomass in 2018.11 The STECF has therefore mainly measured progress in terms of the amount being fished, rather than the overall biomass. It does this by comparing the fishing mortality (F) for each stock over the year (landings + discards) with an FMSY reference point defined by ICES. If F is equal to or less than FMSY, the stock biomass would be expected to reach BMSY.12 Conversely, where F exceeds FMSY the stock biomass would be unlikely to reduce MSY. STECF then reports the overall trend in the number of stocks that are being exploited in line with MSY. The trend in fishing mortality (F) relative to FMSY from 2003 to 2017 is shown in Figure 9.1 for stocks in the Northeast Atlantic and adjacent seas.13 From 2003 to 2008, the number of stocks fished above FMSY was increasing. This alarming situation saw no improvement across these six consecutive years. In 2008, over three quarters of stocks (76 percent) were fished above the rates supporting MSY. From 2009 onwards, progress was evident, and by 2013 over half (53 percent) of stocks were fished at or below FMSY. Further incremental improvements were reported, with 2017 showing 59 percent of stocks to be fished at or below FMSY. Movement is now in the right direction, but there is still more to do, with 41 percent of assessed stocks in 2017 still being fished at rates exceeding MSY. A linear projection indicates that, if progress continues at the same rate, it will fall short of the 2020 deadline with around 30 percent of stocks assessed still fished above FMSY. The indicators quoted in Figure 9.1 only relate to the stocks that can be assessed in this way. While they are likely to represent most of the EU’s commercial fish catch (as the most commercially important stocks tend to receive the most scientific resources), more than half the stocks of commercially exploited fish and shellfish are not scientifically assessed.

11 STECF, Monitoring the Performance 2019. 12 BMSY is the biomass that enables a fish stock to deliver its Maximum Sustainable Yield. In theory, BMSY is the population size at the point of maximum growth rate. 13 FAO Region 27, including stocks in the Baltic Sea, Bay of Biscay and Iberia, Celtic Seas, Greater North Sea, and North-East Atlantic.

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Number of stocks

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69%

70%

74%

76%

76%

76%

31%

30%

26%

24%

24%

24%

63%

58%

37%

42%

51%

53%

49%

47%

47%

47%

47%

43%

41%

53%

53%

53%

57%

59%

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 F ≤ FMSY

F exceeded FMSY

80%

Percentage of stocks

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

F ≤ FMSY

Linear (F ≤ FMSY)

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

Figure 9.1: Management performance based on actual fishing mortality (F) relative to FMSY. (source: STECF, Monitoring the Performance).

Progress towards MSY is also closely monitored by environmental NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs), including the Pew Charitable Trusts, which lobbied the EC to implement stronger measures as part of its campaign to “End Overfishing in North Western Europe.”14 While the STECF was pragmatic in focusing on F, being the indicator that was more widely available, the NGOs argued that the CFP objectives not only commit to MSY exploitation rates [i.e. FMSY], but also to “restore and maintain populations of harvested species above levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield”; this relates to the biomass [i.e. BMSY]. Biological stock performance is more difficult to measure than fishing mortality due to the complexity surrounding MSY reference points.15 Important biological reference points include a limit point (Blim, below which recruitment risks impairment), a precautionary approach point (Bpa, which offers a low probability of falling below Blim), and an MSY point (BMSY, that enables a stock

14 https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/ending-overfishing-in-northwestern-europe. 15 The number of stocks analyzed in Figure 9.3 is notably lower than the equivalent in Figure 9.2, which is based on more limited data available for both the spawning stock biomass level and biomass reference point.

170

Rod Cappell and Fiona Nimmo

Number of stocks

to deliver MSY).16 ICES considers BMSY as a fluctuating, moving range, and therefore to monitor the state of the stock it sets a MSY Btrigger point at the lower end of this fluctuation. If BMSY is not presented, the risk is that decision-makers and stakeholders consider MSY Btrigger to be a good enough reference for MSY, when in fact it is intended to be the lower bound of MSY. This is often the case; MSY Btrigger is not available and Bpa is used as a proxy (in 2016, for instance, this occurred for 66 percent of stocks analysed), meaning that progress towards MSY is not possible to measure.17 This is further highlighted in the STECF monitoring of CFP performance, where biological stock biomass is measured relative to the precautionary points of Bpa or Fpa, due to BMSY not being defined. That is, in STECF monitoring, a stock is considered to be outside safe biological limits where F>Fpa or B