It was really good to see the first in the series of Hugh’s Fish
Fight last night. The Wildlife Trusts
have been campaigning for years to improve the protection of our marine environment
and it is really good to see someone bring this more into the public arena.
The statistics are stark:
We probably have less than one twentieth of the fish in the sea than we
might expect in a natural situation. If
you compare the catch landed in the year 1900 with the catch landed in the year
2000 (with the massive increase in technology and fishing effort), less than
10% of the 1900 figure was landed in 2000. The odds are that if we had managed the sea
sustainably we would now be harvesting vastly more fish than we are now.
This is not a case of conservationists causing the collapse
of an industry. This is a case of an
industry, through bad practice, bad management and (especially) bad regulation,
killing itself. Indeed it is the action
of conservationists that is the one thing that might save the industry in the
long term.
The Marine Act was a success. The proposal for 127 Marine Conservation
Zones, whilst extremely limited, was a success. The number of actual MCZs going forward to
consultation (31) is a scandal! The
reticence is due to some skewed view of economics where the environment is
always perceived as a cost and any exploitative activity is seen as income. Here we have a very clear example of where an unsustainable
industry has damaged itself, and yet people still seem to see the conservation of
the resource it relies on as a cost! MCZs
will mean more fish in the sea, not less, and could be one of the ways of
saving the industry, not damaging it.
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