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Minister to fight 'tooth and nail' for fishermen in EU talks

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Published Date: 06 November 2009
By Andy Philip
SCOTTISH fisheries secretary Richard Lochhead has promised to fight "tooth and nail" for the industry ahead of European talks.
In a debate in the Scottish Parliament, he said a "shared vision" would help in the long term.

He said: "We will fight tooth and nail for a good deal for Scotland at these negotiations, but no matter the outcome, the Scottish industry face
s stormy waters ahead. We need to work with the industry to develop a sustainable future."

The EU talks will centre on the quota policy which forces fishermen to throw away much of their catch, known as discards.

Labour MSP Sarah Boyack compared last year's "optimism" from the government with the harsher reality of tough negotiations in a recession.

She said: "This year it's pretty clear from the fishing communities they don't want the rhetoric. The fishermen have seen through it, the processors have seen through it, we have seen through it – the party's over."

Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur warned the regulations controlling days at sea worked up over 2008 and agreed by ministers last December were "unworkable".

He added: "The anger felt by Scottish fishermen over that deal has been made worse by what they see as attempts by the Scottish minister to claim it as a success – then take months to admit its inadequacies."

Mr Lochhead must "demonstrate the appetite for a fight", he told MSPs.





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  • Last Updated: 05 November 2009 8:30 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Sea fishing industry
 
1

Jock Tamson,

Scotland, Caledonia, Alba 05/11/2009 22:21:29
Liam McArthur wants Scotland to fight in the corridors of power of the EU.

I want Scotland to fight in the room - at the table.
2

Jock's Away,

06/11/2009 05:39:35
The Minister performs like a gelding in a stud farm.

The Lisbon Treaty is of particular interest to the fishing industries of the EU as it reaffirms and enshrines that the EU has exclusive competence over the conservation of marine biological resources under the Common Fisheries Policy. The final piece of the jigsaw will be put in place to achieve a single EU fleet operating in EU and 3rd country waters under the direction of the Commission with member states acting as its agents.
News Flash Minister, you have little or no say. the true meaning of subsidiarity, is forming. National parliments will get six weeks to review EU poroposed Leglation. Not sure Scotland ever has this right, not being a member of EU, it would go to London
That famous Scot Gordon Brown has signed away your birth rights at Lisbon. See also the Treaties of Amsterdam, Maastricht, and the Edinburgh European Coucil 1992, all part of the erosion process.

Note: for the fishermen of Scotland, you will be able to live but large expensive trawlers or high tech invovation will be severelly limited.

3

Scotindy,

Los Angeles 06/11/2009 06:29:25
At least we have a SCOT willing to FIGHT OUR CORNER. INDEPENDENCE AT ALL COSTS.......
4

Sean K,

Elgin 06/11/2009 06:53:16
Sarah Boyack and Liam McArthur's parties sold our fishermen out to the EU common fisheries policy years ago. no one in their party stood up for our coastal communities, - no one in new Labour or Lib-dem parties engaged in tough negotiations or showed any appetite for the fight.

Rather , their Ministers castigated our fishers and trotted out the EC CFP line that our men were to blame for stock reduction and our fleets had to be reduced again and again, and quotas cut back year after year.

Finally in Richard Lochhead there is one who is prepared to challenge the EC. Sadly with the terms of the new Lisbon Treaty, it is a lost cause - till we get out of the EC strait-jacket.

But that is Brussel's fault not the SNP's and the fault of the Tories who gave away our fishing grounds at the beginning, - and of Labour that has reneged on their pledge to give us a referendum on the EU.

5

Ewan Randall,

06/11/2009 06:58:49
If there is a quota on the amount of fish caught because of reduced stocks then why is there not a quota on the number of fishing boats able to fish in an area over the same period of time?
6

Alan B,

06/11/2009 08:58:34
If labour gave a dam they would have made reform of cfp a condition of supporting lisbon.

Scotland would be far better of negotiating its own deal.
7

Nevsky;,

St Petersburg 06/11/2009 12:23:24
5 Ewan*

Because some boats are big and some are little...simple enough for you?

Quota is calculated and allocated regarding biomass and not on the number of boats.

Fishermen have followed every scientific dictat issued since the 70s and has made no difference...perhaps the scientists are to blame...they got it wrong.

What should be introsuced is coatsl fisheries..local boats and local and national management of the fishery....simple as that really.
8

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 14:01:53
If Scotland were an independent member of the EU, and Richard Lochhead sat in the Fisheries Council with equal rights, he would not be one bit better off than he is at the moment. He could protest all he likes, but the huge politically powerful corporations that stand behind the Spanish and French governments in particular will not allow any deviation from the present CFP that works to their disadvantage. Anyone who imagines that we only need a direct Scottish presence in the EU, when difficulties with the CFP will disappear overnight, is living in a dream world.

Let's get this straight - the ruthless exploitation of Scotland by the EU is not due to a misunderstanding. The CFP has nothing to do with management or conservation, in both of which fields it has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster. The CFP's raison d'être is purely and simply to provide the multinational corporations that own the bulk of the Spanish, French and even the Danish fleets with an entry ticket to waters that they would not normally be allowed to plunder, and that means in the first instance Scotland's territorial waters.

Fishing was never a UK function until Edward Heath gave the "expendable" Scottish industry away to the EEC as a bargaining counter. Under the Scottish Department of Agriculture and Fisheries the Scottish offshore fleet - three times as large as the present one - harvested the seas, as it had done for centuries, while maintaining stable and healthy fish stocks. The fault for the ecological, environmental, economic, social and cultural disaster that has taken place since January 1973 lies squarely with London treachery and Brussels intrigue and incompetence.
9

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 14:04:28
Let's get this straight - the ruthless exploitation of Scotland by the EU is not due to a misunderstanding. The CFP has nothing to do with management or conservation, in both of which fields it has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster. The CFP's raison d'être is purely and simply to provide the multinational corporations that own the bulk of the Spanish, French and even the Danish fleets with an entry ticket to waters that they would not normally be allowed to plunder, and that means in the first instance Scotland's territorial waters.

Fishing was never a UK function until Edward Heath gave the "expendable" Scottish industry away to the EEC as a bargaining counter. Under the Scottish Department of Agriculture and Fisheries the Scottish offshore fleet - three times as large as the present one - harvested the seas, as it had done for centuries, while maintaining stable and healthy fish stocks. The fault for the ecological, environmental, economic, social and cultural disaster that has taken place since January 1973 lies squarely with London treachery and Brussels intrigue and incompetence.

There is only one remedy for this - Scotland must get out of the UK and also the EU. The entire fisheries problem - and a good deal else besides - will be resolved overnight if Scotland transfers from its present part-membership of the EU side of the European Economic Area to the EFTA side of the EEA. This will also have entirely beneficial effects in other directions, as has been shown by the example of Norway, and Scotland's trading links with Europe will continue unbroken.

The part-European EU is not to be equated with "Europe". It started off as the economic arm of the European integration movement, which also comprises the other four much larger European organisations that represent the entire continent, and has now got completely out of hand.

I make no apologies for referring once again to the SDA Scotland in Europe policy, which is the only party poli
10

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 14:05:25
I make no apologies for referring once again to the SDA Scotland in Europe policy, which is the only party policy that recognises the reality of the situation as well as the only remedy for it:

www.scottishdemocraticalliance.org
11

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 14:17:02
P:S: Sorry about the text duplication above. There should really be a means of correcting comments. And it is time that The Scotsman gave us a means of telling when we are at the text limit before we click on Post Comment.
12

The Former Mr. Angry,

Perth 06/11/2009 16:12:51
The only way to fight "tooth and nail" for fishermen in Scotland and the UK is to make a rapid exit from the corrupt EU which has ruined the industry through plundering the waters round our shores by EU vessels and then proceeds to apply catch limits and time limitations on OUR vessels to accord with false conservation measures. There would be no need for these is we resumed our rights to fishing grounds in our own territorial waters much as Iceland did.
13

Shellfishfarmer,

Inverness 06/11/2009 17:16:56
Much as I admire much of what James Wilkie has offered in the past, I am afraid he is avoiding the obvious and that is with modern fishing technology and the larger boat sizes, the Scottish fishing effort actually increased over the last two and a bit decades until about 5 years ago. The reality is that ever since the invention of the steam drifter our fishing resource has been under pressure. This came to a turning point in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s when the catch peaked and then began to fall back and has been falling ever since.

The giveaway was that the year class of fish caught got younger and younger - a sure sign that we were fishing out the resource. I agree though that France, Denmark and Spain have their own anti - conservation agendas.
14

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 19:59:53
#13: I am well aware of the influence of technology creep in fisheries, and in fact it played a large role in the work I have done in cooperation with the Fishermen's Association (FAL). I have read the Royal Society of Edinburgh's survey of Scottish fisheries, I have read the EU Green Paper, and I have read the EU Commission's proposals for quota allocations for 2010 (to which I might justifiably ask "When will they ever learn?").

We have put forward many proposals for coping with technology creep, e.g. limiting boat size and engine power as well as certain types of fishing gear, especially within the 12-mile limit (which the EU plans to abolish), but the EU suffers from acute deafness as well as blindness, and the arrogance and "we know best" ideology of the bureaucrats is insufferable - that is, when they reply at all. It reached a peak during the incumbency of the unspeakable Emma Bonino as Fisheries Commissioner - who as usual knew damn all about fishing, like her officials and advisors. I took part in drafting six major submissions to the EEC/EU on fishing, and there were countless others, but not one of them produced any result.

Our proposals would have had the effect of stimulating the Scottish tradition of smaller family-owned boats with very benign environmental and ecological footprints, but of course it is anathema to the multinational corporations that exert such an influence on EU policy, since their large vessels have to operate on economy of size, especially when that operation is at considerable distances from their home ports.
15

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 06/11/2009 20:02:14
The effect of this benighted, neo-liberal EU ideology on fish stocks has been not merely a drastic reduction in numerical size, but also a deterioration in the genetic characteristics of the main commercial species, like maturity at a younger age, that is estimated will take several centuries to correct by natural means - and that presupposes that fishing effort is reduced to, say, the 1950s level. Even if this process started just before the EEC took fishing out of the hands of the Scottish Department of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1973, the mad ideology that has been followed since then ("sharing the common resource") has seriously aggravated the situation instead of correcting it. Or is that not the reason the EU is in the fishing business in the first place?

At any rate, the direct administration of an individual industry is not a legitimate function of the European Union, although it can regulate trade in fisheries products. That is all that stood in the Treaty of Rome, when the EEC's own legal advisers pointed out that there was no treaty basis for a fisheries policy at all. They went ahead with it nevertheless, which tells us as much about the Union's attitude to the rule of law as do certain other more recent developments.

Regarding changes to the genetic characteristics of commercial species as a result of overfishing, see the result of studies by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis:

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/iiasa35/docs/speakers/speech/pdf/Dieckmann_Heino.pdf

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/iiasa35/docs/speakers/speech/ppts/dieckmann.pdf

 

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