Callum Roberts, BBC News 17 Dec 07;
The dire state of many fish stocks means calls to increase catch quotas are misguided, argues Callum Roberts. Restraint now, he says, could yield major benefits later.
Britain's Fisheries Minister, Jonathan Shaw, goes to Brussels this week for the annual round of haggling over fish quotas.
His stated goal is to allow more cod to be landed from the North Sea.
In the minister's view, there are too many cod today following a modest increase in numbers this year, which is why boats are catching more than their quotas.
Only 20,000 tonnes could be taken legally this year from the North Sea by all comers, and about half this amount by British boats.
The rest that are caught have to be thrown over the side - dead.
By any standards, chucking away good fish after spending time and fuel catching them seems like madness.
It is. But the minister would be deeply unwise to deal with the problem of throwing away fish simply by raising quotas.
Fisheries in Europe are in serious trouble. Catching more fish at a time when stocks of many species, including cod, are at or near all time lows will only aggravate problems.
A little history paints a very different picture of cod's recent "recovery".
Vast riches
I have pieced together the effects on marine life of 1,000 years of fishing in a recent book, The Unnatural History of the Sea.
England's cod fisheries can be traced back to the 11th Century. At this time, falling stocks of freshwater fish and rising demand persuaded people it was worth fishing at sea.
They have never looked back.
For the following eight centuries, the fishing industry boomed, and cod and herring were the mainstay of British fisheries, dwarfing catches of all other species.
At the turn of the 20th Century, UK boats caught six to eight times more cod from the North Sea than today using much more primitive technology. Cod stocks then were at least ten times greater than today.
Rewind another 50 years to the middle 19th century, and stocks were at least twice as great again as in 1900.
It gets harder to estimate population sizes before this time, but anecdotes suggest even higher abundance.
In the early 19th Century, for example, three fishers working with handlines on the Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea were said to have caught 1,600 cod in a day.
If they worked a 16-hour day, not unusual at the time, each man would have landed around one cod every five minutes for the entire day.
And the cod were much larger then. Metre-long specimens filled the floors of fish markets in the 19th Century and were sold individually.
Today, most cod landed are only around 45-to-55cm long (six to nine times less heavy than a metre-long fish).
Taken together, these figures suggest that cod was once 30 to 50 times more abundant in the North Sea than it is today.
This is a better lens through which to view recent cod "recovery".
More mouths
Last year's increase in cod stock represents less than 1% of the historical population size.
Estimates of North Sea stocks today are only a quarter to a third of the EU's rebuilding target of 150,000 tonnes. But this target looks decidedly unambitious in view of the fact that it is probably less than 10% of the historical population size.
With an increasing world population to feed, we cannot return the seas to the healthy state they were in before fishing.
But raising population levels from today's lows should boost production of seafood.
Fisheries science predicts that we can maximise the productivity of fisheries by maintaining populations around half their unexploited size, which for cod would be a level 15 to 25 times higher than the present population.
Industrialising fisheries of the 20th Century sustained catches only by inventing ever better ways of catching fish and spreading across the globe in search of less intensively exploited stocks.
But we are near the end of that road. Looking forward today, instead of a prosperous future for the industry, we can see the end of fishing.
Safety catches
European fisheries are in a worse state than many, despite having one of the most sophisticated management systems anywhere in the world.
Every year, hundreds of scientists from across the EU pool their data to recommend safe catch levels. Those data are considered at the December meeting of fisheries ministers.
Over the last 20 years ministers have - year-on-year - exceeded safe catch recommendations by an average of 15-30%, depending on the species.
Ministers claim their decisions generally exceed scientific recommendations because they must take into account the best interests of the fishing industry.
In reality, disregarding science (paid for by taxpayers, it should be added) condemns the industry to slow death.
You can't cut more grass than a lawn grows no matter how many times you mow it.
But under the Common Fisheries Policy, ministers have tried to cheat nature by taking more fish than are produced each year, leading to plummeting populations in the wild.
Their habitual disregard for advice puts them more in the role of doctors assisting the suicide of a patient; because with this decision-making record, stock collapse becomes a certainty.
The only question is: how long will it take?
Restoring sanity
It is possible to end the madness of discarding fish, but this must be part of a wider package of reform to fisheries management.
We must first eliminate risky decision-making by politicians.
In many countries, governments have realised that the economy is too important for decisions on interest rates to be made by ministers and have devolved this responsibility to independent central banks.
We need similar independent decision making on safe catches by a body that respects expert opinion and is free of the influence of politics and industry.
We also need to fish less.
Best estimates suggest we need to cut fishing effort by half to rebuild fishery prosperity. The science is clear - by fishing less we will catch more.
And of critical importance, we need to reduce the footprint of fishing by creating marine reserves in around 30% of the area of our seas where fish and their habitats can prosper.
Those reserves will help supply surrounding fisheries with a steady stream of young fish, and will help habitats recover from centuries of damage by trawls and dredges.
Britain was once one of the world's great fishing nations.
Over time our success in hunting fish has exceeded our ability to protect supplies, and the fishing industry today is spiralling into a near terminal decline.
What Britain needs from its fisheries minister is great leadership in steering our EU partners towards a root-and-branch reform of its dysfunctional management system.
What it does not need is one committed to taking more of the few cod that are left today.
Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, and author of The Unnatural History of the Sea
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
