fishing | ukwatch.net

Protect and Survive

Alex Doherty — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:13:06 +0000

It is not often that a bureaucrat makes a major scientific discovery. So hats off to Peter Power. The European Commission’s spokesperson for trade, writing to the Guardian last week, has invented a new ecological concept: excess fish. Seeking to justify policies which would ensure that European trawlers are allowed to keep fishing in West African waters, Mr Power claims that they will be removing only the region’s “excess stocks”(1). Well, someone has to do it. Were it not for our brave trawlermen battling Nature’s delinquent productivity, the seas would become choked with these disgusting scaly creatures.

Power was responding to the column I wrote a fortnight ago, which showed how fish stocks have collapsed and the people of Senegal have gone hungry as a result of plunder by other nations. The Economic Partnership Agreement the EC wants Senegal to sign would make it much harder for that country to keep our boats out of its waters. Power maintains that “the question of access to Senegalese waters by EU fleets … is not part of these trade negotiations.”

This is a splendid example of strategic stupidity. No one is claiming that there is a specific fish agreement for Senegal. But the EC’s demand that European companies have the right to establish themselves freely on African soil and to receive “national treatment” would ensure that Senegal is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and foreign firms. It would then be unable to exclude European boats. Is this really too much for a well-paid bureaucrat to grasp?

After that column was published, several people wrote to suggest that the problem is worse than I thought. Senegal’s fish crisis is part of a bitterly ironic story. As Felicity Lawrence shows in her book Eat Your Heart Out, the people of Senegal have become dependent on fishing partly because of the collapse of farming(2). In 1994, Senegal was forced to remove its trade taxes. This allowed the EU to dump subsidised tomatoes and chicken on its markets, putting its farmers out of business. They moved into fishing at about the same time as the European super-trawlers arrived, and were wiped out again. So fishing boats were instead deployed to carry economic migrants out of Senegal. Lawrence discovered that those who survive the voyage to Europe are being employed in near-slavery by … the subsidised tomato industry.

But this is just one aspect of a scandal which has been missed by almost every journalist in the UK. While we have been fretting about house prices and the Big Brother final, the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, has been seeking to impose new trade agreements on 76 of the world’s poorest countries: the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations (ACP). Posing as “instruments for development”, the Economic Partnership Agreements threaten to beggar them.

The people of these countries know that trade is essential to pull them out of poverty. But they also see that unless it is conducted fairly it impoverishes them more. Many are aware that the European equation of fair trade with free trade is nonsense.

Neoliberal economists claim that rich countries got that way by removing their barriers to trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Ha-Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, Britain discovered its enthusiasm for free trade only after it had achieved economic dominance(3). The industrial revolution was built on protectionism: in 1699, for example, we banned the import of Irish woollens; in 1700 we banned cotton cloth from India. To protect and develop our infant industries, we imposed ferocious tariffs (trade taxes) on almost all manufactured goods.

By 1816 the US had imposed a 35% tax on most imported manufactures, which rose to 50% in 1832. Between 1864 and 1913 it was the most heavily protected nation on earth; and the fastest-growing. It wasn’t until after the Second World War, when it had already become top dog, that it dropped most of its tariffs. The same strategy was followed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and almost every other country that is rich today. Within the ACP nations, the great success story of the past 30 years is the country whose protectionism has been fiercest: during the 1980s and 1990s, Mauritius imposed import tariffs of up to 80%(4). Protectionism, which can be easily exploited by corrupt elites, does not always deliver wealth; but development is much harder without it.

Mandelson’s attempt to deprive the poor nations of these strategies is just one of the injustices he is trying to impose. While he wants the ACP countries to eliminate tariffs on the import of almost all goods, Europe will sustain its farm subsidies. In combination, these policies could put millions out of work.

As Oxfam shows, he’s also negotiating to let European corporations muscle out local firms and to make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education, water and banking. The ACP countries would be forbidden to impose tough capital controls during a financial crisis: the need for European companies to get their money out takes precedence over the economic survival of the poor. He wants them to adopt a plant-breeding treaty which bans farmers from saving their own seeds(5).

Mandelson tried to force all this through by last December, warning the ACP that if they didn’t sign up by then, world trade rules would ensure that they lost their preferential trading status with Europe. The UN trade adviser Dr Dan Gay tells me that people in the talks between the EC, Fiji and Papua New Guinea claim that “Mandelson shouted ‘neo-colonial-style’ at ministers, suggesting that they were so incompetent that they had to rely on foreign advisers.”(6) Mandelson’s office says he “did express the wish to negotiate with ministers present, rather than their advisers. However, he did not shout ‘neo-colonial style’ at anyone.”(7)

Either way, there is no question that the ACP countries have been bullied. In December their trade ministers published a joint statement deploring “the enormous pressure that has been brought to bear on the ACP States by the European Commission”(8). Over half of them refused to sign anything. The rest initialled draft agreements. Peter Mandelson is still twisting arms, trying to force the treaties through as quickly as possible. Last week the Caribbean heads of state were due to commit themselves, but pulled back at the last minute: tomorrow they hold a meeting to decide what to do next. I hope they have the balls to tear the whole thing up and start again.

If the aim of these negotiations had been to enrich European companies at the expense of the poor, Peter Mandelson would have done well. If, as the commission claims, the partnership agreements are “primarily conceived as an instrument for development”(9), his interventions have been disastrous. He appears to have pursued these talks in the style of a 21st Century viceroy: no humanitarian concern is allowed to obstruct commercial interests.

In the short term, and within a limited frame of reference, the commission’s tactics might enhance our self-interest. But we are better than this. If the people of Europe knew what was being done in their name, I doubt that one in ten would support it.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Peter Power, 4th September 2008. Trade: one size doesn’t fit all. The Guardian.

2. Felicity Lawrence, 2008. Eat Your Heart Out. Penguin, London.

3. Ha-Joon Chang, 2002. Kicking Away the Ladder. Anthem Press, London.

4. Oxfam, 21st April 2008. Partnership or Power Play? Briefing Paper 110. http://www.oxfam.org/files/bp110_europe_EPAs_trade_deals_with_acp_countr…

5. ibid.

6. Dan Gay, pers comm.

7. Michael Jennings, Press Officer for Trade, Economic Commission, pers comm.

8. The ACP Council of Ministers, 13th December 2007. Declaration Expressing Serious Concern on the Status of the Negotiations of the Economic Partnership Agreements. http://www.acp-eu-trade.org/index.php?loc=epa/AllACP-2.php

9. European Commission, 8th August 2008. Economic Partnership Agreements: A New Approach in EU-ACP Trade Relations. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/bilateral/regions/acp/index_en.htm

Manufactured Famine

tim — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:31:02 +0000

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history”, between 12 and 29 million people died(1). Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish(2). Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women(3). Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal’s stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997(4).

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements(5,6). In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.

The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen – mostly from Spain and France – have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take the country’s fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.

Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised.

The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU’s negotiations as “not sufficiently inclusive”. They suffer from a “lack of transparency” and from the African countries’ lack of capacity to handle the legal complexities(7). ActionAid shows that Mandelson’s office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and “moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle.” If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial famine.

This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK’s indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food(8). We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of Pakistan’s best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley’s aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.

Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over “the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on.” Through “secretive bilateral agreements,” the paper reports, “the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis.” (9)

Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares(10,11). This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people’s property into foreign exchange(12,13). But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines.

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but – in the short term at any rate – we will hardly notice. The rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.

References:

1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

2. ActionAid, 11th August 2008. SelFISH Europe. http://www.illegal-fishing.info/uploads/ActionAidSelFISHEurope.pdf

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Vlad M. Kaczynski and David L. Fluharty, March 2002. European policies in West Africa: who benefits from fisheries agreements? Marine Policy, Volume 26, Issue 2, pp75-93.
doi:10.1016/S0308-597X(01)00039-2

6. Tim Judah, 1st August 2001. The battle for West Africa’s fish. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1464966.stm

7. UNECA, EPA Negotiations: African Countries Continental Review, African Trade Policy Centre, February 2007. Quoted by ActionAid, ibid.

8. Ashok Chapagain and Stuart Orr, August 2008. UK Water Footprint: the impact of the UK’s food
and fibre consumption on global water resources. Volume one. http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_uk_footprint.pdf

9. Javier Blas and Andrew England, 19th August 2008. Foreign fields: Rich states look beyond their borders for fertile soil. Financial Times.

10. ibid.

11. Barney Jopson and Andrew England, 11th August 2008. Sudan woos investors to put $1bn in farming. Financial Times.

12. For discussions of how landrights in Africa are overruled, see:

Lorenzo Cotula, September 2007. Legal empowerment for local resource control. International Institute for Environment and Development. http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/12542IIED.pdf

and:

13. Camilla Toulmin, 2006. Securing Land and Property Rights in Africa: Improving the
Investment Climate. Chapter 2.3 of the Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum, Switzerland.

Kept Afloat on a Tide of Money

JamieSW — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:39:21 +0000

All over the world, protesters are engaged in a heroic battle with reality. They block roads, picket fuel depots, throw missiles and turn over cars in an effort to hold it at bay. The oil is running out and governments, they insist, must do something about it. When they’ve sorted it out, what about the fact that the days are getting shorter? What do we pay our taxes for?

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world’s fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan and demonstrating in scores of maritime countries. Last month in Brussels they threw rocks and flares at the police, who have been conspiring with the world’s sedimentary basins to keep the price of oil high. The fishermen warn that if something isn’t done to help them, thousands could be forced to scrap their boats and hang up their nets. It’s an appalling prospect, which we should greet with heartfelt indifference.

Just as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world’s marine ecosystems. No East Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can’t afford to sail1. The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won’t be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish2. The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen – who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species – warn that their industry could collapse within a year3. Hurray to that too.

It would, of course, be better for everyone if these unsustainable practices could be shut down gently without the need for a crisis or the loss of jobs, but this seems to be more than human nature can bear. The European Union has a programme for taking fishing boats out of service – the tonnage of the European fleet has fallen by 5% since 19994 – but the decline in boats is too slow to overtake the decline in stocks. Every year the EU, like every other fishery authority, tries to accommodate its surplus boats by setting quotas higher than those proposed by its scientific advisers, and every year the population of several species is pressed a little closer to extinction.

The fishermen make two demands, which are taken up by politicians in coastal regions all over the world: they must be allowed to destroy their own livelihoods, and the rest of us should pay for it. Over seven years, European taxpayers will be giving this industry E3.8bn5. Some of this money is used to take boats out of service and to find other jobs for fishermen, but the rest is used to equip boats with new engines and new gear, to keep them on the water, to modernise ports and landing sites and to promote and market the catch. Except for the funds used to re-train fishermen or help them into early retirement, there is no justification for this spending. At least farmers can argue – often falsely – that they are the “stewards of the countryside”. But what possible argument is there for keeping more fishermen afloat than the fish population can bear?

The EU says its spending will reduce fishing pressure and help fishermen adopt greener methods. In reality, it is delaying the decline of the industry and allowing it to defy ecological limits for as long as possible. If the member states want to protect the ecosystem, it’s a good deal cheaper to legislate than to pay. Our fishing policies, like those of almost all maritime nations, are a perfect parable of commercial stupidity and short-termism, helping an industry to destroy its long-term prospects for the sake of immediate profit.

But the fishermen only demand more. The headline on this week’s Fishing News is “Thanks for Nothing!”, bemoaning the British government’s refusal to follow France, Spain and Italy in handing out fuel subsidies6. But why the heck should it? The Scottish fishing secretary, Richard Lochhead, demands that the government in Westminster “open the purse strings”. He also insists that new money is “not tied to decommissioning”: in other words no more boats should be taken off the water7. Is this really a service to the industry, or only to its most short-sighted members?

I have a leaked copy of the draft proposal that European states will discuss on Thursday8. It’s a disaster. Some of the boats which, under existing agreements, will be scrapped and turned into artificial reefs, permanently reducing the sized of the fleet, can now be replaced with smaller vessels. The EU will pay costs and salaries for crews stranded by the fuel crisis, so that they stay in business and can start fishing again when the price falls. Member states will be able to shell out more money (E100,000 per boat instead of E30,000) without breaking state aid rules. They can hand out new grants for replacing old equipment with more fuel-efficient gear. The proposal seems to be aimed at ensuring that the industry collapses through lack of fish rather than lack of fuel. The fishermen won’t go down without taking the ecosystem with them.

What makes the draft document so dumb is that in some regions, especially in British waters, the industry is just beginning to turn. While French, Spanish and Italian fishermen clamour for a resumption of bluefin tuna fishing9, knowing that if they are allowed to fish now, this will be the last season ever, around the UK it has begun to dawn on some fishermen that there might be an association between the survival of the fish and the survival of the fishing. Prompted by Young’s seafood and some of the supermarkets, who in turn have been harried by environmental groups, some of the biggest British fisheries have applied for eco-labels from the Marine Stewardship Council, which sets standards for how fish are caught10. Fishermen around the UK also seem to be taking the law more seriously, and at last to be showing some interest in obscure issues such as spawning grounds and juvenile fish (which, believe it or not, turn out to have a connection to future fish stocks). By ensuring that far too many boats, and far too many desperate fishermen, stay on the water, and that the remaining quotas are stretched too thinly, the EU will slow down or even reverse the greening of the industry.

Why is this issue so hard to resolve? Why does every representative of a fishing region believe he must defend his constituents’ right to ensure that their children have nothing to inherit? Why do the leaders of the fishermen’s associations feel the need always to denounce the scientists who say that fish stocks decline if they are hit too hard? If this is a microcosm of how human beings engage with the environment, the prospect for humanity is not a happy one.

1. Tom Seaman, July 2008. Global supply of sushi tuna to plummet on soaring fuel prices. Intrafish, Vol 6, Issue 7.
2. Steve Quinn, 29th June 2008. Time to jump ship? Almost, say commercial fishermen. The Associated Press.
3. James Meikle, 23rd May 2008. Fish prices may rise by up to 50%. The Guardian.
4. European Union, 2008. Evolution of the fleet’s number of vessels, tonnage and engine power. http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/fleetstatistics/index.cfm?lng=en
5. European Commission, 2006. The European Fisheries Fund 2007-2013. http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/publications/FEP_EN.pdf
6. Fishing News, 4th July 2008.
7. No author given, 4th July 2008. ‘Open the Purse Strings’ – Lochhead. Fishing News.
8. The Council of the European Union, 2008. Proposal for a Council Regulation instituting a temporary specific action aiming to promote the restructuring of the European fisheries fleets affected by the economic crisis.
9. Agence France Press, 17th June 2008. EU rejects calls to drop planned tuna fishing ban.
10. Severin Carrell, 26th March 2008. British seas turning green, says watchdog. The Guardian.

Bluefin thinking

Ellie Keen — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Tuna, particularly the canned variety, has long been one of the UK’s staple foods and most of us probably have a couple of tin or two somewhere in our cupboards. More recently, we’ve been developing a taste for raw tuna, as sushi bars continue to spread throughout the country.

So, what’s the problem? Tuna is a wild source of protein. We don’t farm tuna; we catch it from the great oceans of the world. And that is where the predicament starts, because global tuna stocks, like those of other species, have been grossly overexploited and are now in big trouble. The iconic bluefin tuna, widely used in sushi, is critically endangered. Bigeye and albacore tuna are also under threat, while yellowfin tuna is in decline globally. Worldwide, up to 90% of stocks of large predatory fish, including tuna, have already been fished out.

The organisations responsible for managing the international tuna fisheries have failed dismally. But where governments have failed, retailers, restaurants and consumers can help turn the tide.

Greenpeace is campaigning to stop the collapse of the world’s remaining tuna fisheries, pushing for the creation of large scale marine reserves and changes in fishing practices to allow tuna and other fish stocks to recover.

This month, the Greenpeace ship Esperenza is confronting tuna boats that are fishing unsustainably in the Pacific. Meanwhile, today, more than 80 Greenpeace activists used nets and chains to close down the stands of five of the biggest and most unscrupulous tuna suppliers at the European Seafood Expo, the world’s largest seafood fair.

The UK is a huge consumer of canned tuna on a global scale. We import well over 100,000 tonnes each year. Sushi sales are also increasing. So, what can we do as consumers?

First of all, look out for restaurants and retailers that show commitment to sustainable seafood when you eat out or shop. For example, it was hearing about the plight of tuna that leading UK sushi chain Moshi Moshi to the decision to stop serving bluefin in their restaurants and to adopt strict sourcing policies. Among retailers, Marks and Spencer has consistently topped Greenpeace’s seafood sustainability surveys. Second, avoid red-listed species like bluefin tuna. (You can find a guide to these species here.)

Third, wherever possible, choose pole- and line-caught tuna, the most environmentally friendly way of catching the fish. Other methods of catching tuna, even when the cans are labelled “dolphin friendly”, can be very destructive – killing rare giant turtles, sharks, juvenile tuna and many other fish species.

Sustainable seafood is part of the answer, but the science is clear that we also need a global network of no-take marine reserves, like national parks at sea, covering large parts of the oceans. Following the science, Greenpeace is calling for 40% of the world’s oceans to be marine reserves, where no fishing is allowed.

By only choosing sustainable seafood in shops and restaurants, we can all make a difference. Alternatively, as professor of marine biology Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia, has said, you don’t need to worry about these problems – as long as your children like plankton stew.