Discards and REM at the Crossroads

Dale Rodmell, chief executive of EEFPO gives his perspective on the reboot of discards policy in the UK.

The Future Catching Policy (FCP) is a new phrase in English and Scottish fisheries policy circles that signals a move away from the discredited EU landings obligation, which remains as part of EU fisheries law retained by the UK, for the time being. Both England and Scotland are working on new policies to replace it. A proposal applying to England is expected in the autumn, while Scotland has recently concluded a public consultation on its proposals.

The Landing Obligation was born out of the later stages of the CFP reform of 2013, catapulted to centre stage off the back of the campaigning TV series Hugh’s Fish Fight. The result was classic media induced moral panic, political opportunism and top-down policy making sutured onto the rest of the CFP, without adequate thought or care. The assumption that a ban on the landing of all quota species could live happily alongside the other fisheries policy objectives was flawed. Problems soon emerged, with conflicting regulations and the new word “choke” entering the fisheries lexicon as countless days were spent by policy makers trying to fix the varied policy conflicts that it generated, in the end to no avail. As the UK approached Brexit, an outline for a future discard policy was laid out in the 2018 Fisheries White Paper. The present initiatives pick up where the White Paper left off.

There are now important questions to address, the most important of which is how to design a discard policy that works to reduce unwanted catch without undermining other aspects of fisheries policy, or the economic wellbeing of fishing businesses and communities.

Pragmatists Versus Enforcers

Policy makers are at the centre of a debate between two camps that have very different views about what should be done. On the one hand, there are those who have experienced implementing the Landing Obligation, including those in industry that see the inherent conflicts and a need to introduce sufficient flexibilities in order for a discards policy to work within the wider management framework. On the other, is the view held principally within the green lobby that the Landing Obligation hasn’t worked because it has not been adequately enforced. They see the answer as the widescale introduction of remote electronic monitoring (REM) such as CCTV as the solution, and are assiduously campaigning for it.

Although some basic contours exist in the Fisheries White Paper on extending flexibilities and use of REM, it is too early to say where policy is heading in England. In Scotland, the direction of the consultations on the future catching policy and REM, suggests an exercise in papering over of the tensions between the two camps. The Scottish proposals pick off some of the less challenging fisheries such as the pelagics and scallopers where it sees that REM can be applied without too many difficulties. But on the demersal trawl fleet, where the problems of chokes in mixed fisheries has been the most acute, although there are a few technical proposals including mesh sizes and escape panels on targeted fisheries and juvenile de minimis adjustments, the proposals on REM are less sure-footed.

Regrettably, instead of an upfront front dissection of the issue of chokes and their significance when under a system of REM, the Scottish consultation assumes that a few technical changes and adjustments through the annual TAC setting negotiation processes will be sufficient. In this context it considers the use of REM boils down to less relevant considerations over whether it is implemented on a reference fleet (i.e. sample of a fleet) or across whole fleet segments. This misses the central issue.

Principles for Reform

If a reformed discards policy with a role for REM is to become a workable policy, then the spectre of fishing vessels tied to the quayside due to chokes, under-utilisation of mixed fishery stocks, and businesses left in an intermittent state of financial freefall, must be avoided. A new approach should recognise that:

• Tackling unwanted waste is an important objective, but the importance of discards and priority given to their minimisation should be proportionate to the risk they pose to the management system and the conservation of stocks. Discard policy should be balanced and work in harmony with other management objectives. Introduced in a top-down, heavy handed way, the Landing Obligation has made few distinctions on this front.
• Managing discards, in particular, needs to be in harmony with the system of setting TACs, but the CFP prioritised MSY based on single species stock assessment over managing discards. Although mixed fishery advice is produced that can help to examine discard risks, these are produced very late in the annual decision-making cycle. The assessment system therefore needs to be reformed to provide decision-makers with more up-front information on setting TACs in the context of discards risk so that informed and transparent decisions over the trade-offs can be made between conflicting fisheries objectives. .
• Given the above, more attention should be given, especially in lower risk settings, to legitimately setting TACs that are more inline in the short-term with avoiding TAC induced chokes, rather than a one dimensional focus on MSY targets.
• Where discards cannot be avoided through technical and operational arrangements, have no value, or have high survivability, then practical de minimis exemptions should be more liberally applied as a system release valve than at present.

The Lesson of Cod Avoidance

Prior to the Landing Obligation, the UK was a pioneer in the applying REM in discard reduction with successful schemes in both England and Scotland as part of cod recovery measures in the North Sea. Under this Fully Documented Fishery scheme, vessels were awarded additional quota subject to REM verification of their catches. In England, EEFPO vessels were active participants of the scheme that ran for 11 years until 2020, after which insufficient quota was made available for it to work practically. TAC setting for the cod stock had reached the point of being unable to reconcile a marked divergence in its abundance in the northern North Sea compared to the south, as climate change has affected the stock.

This scheme, and others like it, have demonstrated the conditions under which REM can add value to incentivise the minimisation of discards through catch verification, and conversely when it cannot. The cod avoidance scheme worked for EEFPO vessels when there was sufficient quota available to facilitate leases and swaps to avoid a choke given the abundance on the grounds, but the need to minimise catches and the incentive as part of the scheme to do so. This was achieved by making seasonal and real-time adjustments to fishing patterns depending on the target stock (haddock, saithe, whiting), where skippers “learned by doing” and adjusted their tactics over time to minimise the cod catch.

This experience should be central to understanding the conditions under which REM can make a positive contribution to fisheries management in mixed fisheries. It makes no sense to use REM as a means to reinforce a system of enforcement in circumstances when the system of management is fundamentally in a state of dysfunction. Something has to give.