Can Cod Be Saved In Europe?

December 20, 2006

Release from: Charles Hawley
Spiegel Online International

The European Union is meeting this week to set next year's fishing quotas for cod. Once again, though, they are ignoring the advice of experts. To save the fish, a complete ban may be necessary.

Mmmm. Jellyfish soup! Served with a bit of garlic and a squirt of lime, it could be just the thing to impress your dinner guests (be sure and trim off the dangly tentacles). But what should you serve up next in your seafood smorgasbord? If you consult the WWF menu handed out Tuesday in Brussels, tofu and chips might be a good option. In fact, it might be your only choice in the not too distant future.

Fish in European waters -- particularly cod -- are in trouble. That much, everyone can agree on. What to do about it, though, remains highly controversial. Environmentalists and marine biologists are convinced that only a complete prohibition on commercial fishing of cod can prevent the population from sliding to levels at which it can no longer adquately reproduce itself. But in Brussels, where EU politicians are meeting this week to determine allowable catch levels for 2007, such drastic measures remain unlikely. Cuts will come, but will they be enough?

"At the moment it is looking quite bad," Martin Pastoors, chairman of the Advisory Commission on Fishery Management, the scientific body which advises the EU on fishery issues, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The (cod) stock is at the lowest level we have ever seen.... We have advised a total ban on cod because the stock in the North Sea has been at a very low level for many years now. A continuation of fishing would mean the population cannot be rejuvenated."

"Tough problems with cod"

Even worse, the European Union, which will likely be haggling into the night on Wednesday to come up with final "Total Allowable Catch" levels for a number of different species swimming in European waters, looks set to ignore their own scientific advisors. The plan is to cut cod fishing in the waters around the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia -- where much of fishery is based -- by just 25 percent. And even that may prove difficult to push through.

It's not the first time cod has been at the top of the Fisheries Commission priority list. In 2002, the EU adopted a recovery plan to address the problem of a steadily dwindling catch; landings of North Sea cod had fallen from 341,000 tons a year in 1972 to a paltry 41,000 tons at the beginning of this decade. Incremental cuts to cod catch levels have become an annual EU tradition since then.

But it doesn't appear to have helped. "We have very tough problems with cod," EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg told reporters on Tuesday before the meeting got started. "We are not happy with the results so far."

It's no wonder, say environmentalists. WWF points out that implementation of the 2002 agreement has left plenty to be desired, with EU levels an average of 30 percent higher than recommendations produced by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, the Denmark-based organization to which the Advisory Commission on Fishery Management belongs.

"We are now back to the annual setting of quotas which has little to do with the environment itself," says WWF communications officer Caroline Alibert. "It amounts to little more than political horse-trading."

Worried fishermen

Yet where conservationists see horse-trading, others see a difficult balancing act between saving the fish and saving the fishermen who depend on them. Some 260,000 fisherman catch €2.8 billion worth of fish and shellfish in the EU each year. While fishing only accounts for some 1 percent of the bloc's economic activity, in some areas it's the only game in town. Many of those fishermen rely on other species than cod. But major catch cuts are also in store for herring (25 percent), sole (15 percent) and plaice (8 percent). A complete ban on anchovy fishing will likely be levied for the first six months of 2007, mostly affecting the coasts of Spain and Portugal. European fishermen, in short, are worried.

But it's not just catch limits that are being addressed in Brussels this week. A reduction in the allowable catch -- or even an outright ban -- wouldn't necessarily mean fewer fish caught. It may just increase the number of fish which are thrown back into the sea dead after being tangled in nets. So-called "by catch" is also a problem. Considerable numbers of cod, for example, are caught by scampi fishermen off the coast of Norway -- with 61 percent of them chucked dead back into the sea.

In other fisheries -- despite the availability of technologies and specially-designed nets designed to limit by catch -- the problem is even worse. Sole and plaice are both bottom fish -- they live near the sea bed -- but sole is worth much more on the market. The result is that up to 80 percent of plaice caught by sole fishermen are discarded and the population is dropping steadily.

Falling fish populations, of course, isn't just a European problem. In 1992, the cod fishery in the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland was formally closed after decades of over-fishing led to a complete collapse of the population. Almost 15 years later, cod in the Grand Banks still hasn't recovered.

A matter of political will

A controversial study released at the beginning of November in the journal Science indicated that by 2048 fish populations the world over may collapse as a result of over-fishing, global warming and other environmental problems. Indeed, it was this study which led to the WWF menu handed out in Brussels on Tuesday.

The news, though, is not yet all doom and gloom for European fisheries. Even as cod levels have dropped for decades, they have dropped at a slower rate recently. And biologist Pastoors says that fish and chips may indeed survive. "If we were to stop fishing, the growth potential for the cod is extremely high and the population could recover very quickly," he says. "It's a matter of political will."