Callum Roberts's Blog, page 2

Why Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight is still necessary

It may be the end of fish discards, but now we need more marine conservation zones to stop our seabeds becoming a wasteland

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Channel 4 TV show Fish Fight has begun a new series. In a stroke of good timing, the European parliament voted last week to phase out the wasteful discarding of fish at sea, the main target of the first series. So you could be forgiven for wondering what there is left to fight for. A great deal, it turns out.

The reckless waste of throwing away prime fish after they have been caught is a symptom of the mismanagement of our seas. But it is not the biggest problem they face. That was revealed in shocking footage from the Irish Sea in last night's programme. I joined Hugh to dive two places in the waters of the Isle of Man, one that had been protected from industrial trawling and dredging for over 20 years, the other regularly worked by scallop dredges and trawls from the local fleet.

Why Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight is still necessary | Callum Roberts

It may be the end of fish discards, but now we need more marine conservation zones to stop our seabeds becoming a wasteland

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Channel 4 TV show Fish Fight has begun a new series. In a stroke of good timing, the European parliament voted last week to phase out the wasteful discarding of fish at sea, the main target of the first series. So you could be forgiven for wondering what there is left to fight for. A great deal, it turns out.

The reckless waste of throwing away prime fish after they have been caught is a symptom of the mismanagement of our seas. But it is not the biggest problem they face. That was revealed in shocking footage from the Irish Sea in last night's programme. I joined Hugh to dive two places in the waters of the Isle of Man, one that had been protected from industrial trawling and dredging for over 20 years, the other regularly worked by scallop dredges and trawls from the local fleet.

As we descended to the seabed in the protected site, it was immediately apparent that every pebble and rock was home to some animal or plant. A meadow of delicately branched sea nettles stretched into the distance, swaying gently with the current. At first glance, it wasn't spectacular like the gaudy magnificence of a coral reef, but the understated nature of its inhabitants invited a closer look. Virtually everywhere was carpeted with life: peacock worms and anemones studded the bottom, while gobies and hairy crabs gave themselves away with slight movements. The sand was pockmarked with depressions the size of dinner plates, each of which, it turned out, was occupied by a huge scallop. Their shells each supported a world in miniature: tiny glades of sea moss, cratered sponges and glassy sea squirts.

I marvelled at the exquisite delicacy of this living bottom and shuddered at the thought of what a single dredge or trawl would do to it. I found out on the second dive in the scallop fishing grounds. A boat was there when we arrived, dragging 10 heavy steel dredges to and fro across the bottom. The dredges resemble the harrows that farmers use to break up clods of earth, and their vertical steel teeth do much the same thing to the seabed as they kick scallops into heavy-duty chainmail bags.

I have been researching the impacts of fishing in the sea for 30 years, so I was prepared for a big difference from the protected area. But the contrast stunned me. Beneath us the bottom was scored with parallel furrows wide as a motorway. It was almost completely devoid of visible life, barren, a desert. In the whole dive I saw just four living things and one dying: two undersized scallops, two urchins and a clam punctured by a dredge tooth, its body spilling from the fracture. The seabed was so bare it seemed polished. The sand was clean and the pebbles smooth and black, having been rolled over and over by dredge and trawl, so unlike the life-encrusted stones of the protected area.

Before the spread of trawling and dredging, these grounds were very different. In 1836 a visitor wrote: "The southern coast of Man yields much seaweed which supplies the Island with good manure. It may be seen waving to and fro at great depth, so extraordinary is the clearness of the water; a perfect submarine forest." And the fish that once thronged in these forests are gone too. An 18th-century traveller said that Peel Bay, a little further up the coast, "… is spacious and abounds with a variety of fish, particularly with the red cod, which is an exquisite delicacy. It is of a bright vermilion colour and feeds among rocks covered with weeds and mosses of a crimson tinge." In the last 30 years, scallop dredgers together with prawn trawlers, which use fine mesh nets to snag scampi, have stripped the Irish Sea of its once abundant fish and turned the seabed to a wasteland.

Why should we care about this transformation if there are still scallops and prawns to be had? After all, huge areas of land have been turned over to crops. This agricultural comparison is often made but it is flawed. We plant crops and nurture them, but we take from the sea only what nature provides. When we simplify terrestrial ecosystems, as we do in agriculture, we render them vulnerable to outbreaks of pests, weeds and diseases, which we control with chemicals. Simplifying the oceans carries the same risks but we have no control over the problems we create there. Those problems are multiplying around our shores today in the form of declining water quality, jellyfish outbreaks, toxic plankton blooms and dead zones. For our seas and the fisheries they sustain to thrive, we must radically change the way they are managed. Put simply, that means fishing less, using less destructive methods, and protecting more.

The government has proposed to create just 31 of 127 marine conservation zones recommended to it for English waters in an £8m consultation that took over two years and involved tens of thousands of people. We need far more. If the network were implemented in full and protected from dredging and trawling, it would help turn around the state of our seas and recover lost fisheries productivity. This is a historic opportunity that we must grasp today. If we drag our heels much longer, there will be little left to protect.

FishingFoodWildlifeConservationAnimalsMarine lifeHugh Fearnley-WhittingstallFishFood & drinkSeafoodChannel 4Callum Roberts
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The high seas are too precious to be left to plunderers and polluters | Callum Roberts

Only now with the launch of the Global Ocean Commission are we finally addressing the ravages of the oceans

The oceans are changing faster today and in more ways than at any time in human history. We are the cause. Which is why I welcome the launch of the Global Ocean Commission, dedicated to ending the neglect, in international affairs, of the high seas. These seas lie far beyond the horizon – 200 nautical miles offshore to be precise – and begin where sovereign national waters give way to the global commons, owned by none, shared by all.

There was a time when foreign travel gave many people a familiarity with the high seas. Rather than a few hours in a plane, "long haul" often meant days or weeks spent staring at an endless canvas of sea and sky. Today, few of us know much about what happens beyond the horizon and still fewer care. Like all common spaces, the high seas are vulnerable to misuse and abuse. Our indifference is costing the world dear for the high seas are being plundered.

For most of our maritime history, the open oceans have been seen as dangerous places to be traversed as quickly as possible. Remote and enduring, they were home to giant fish and whales; seabirds wandered their featureless expanses and ancient corals grew in the eternal darkness of the abyss.

Whalers were first to spot the high seas' potential as a source of wealth, slaughtering their way through the 19th and 20th centuries until the great whales were a few breaths from extinction. Ocean-going seabirds such as albatross and petrels were also early victims of exploitation due to the vulnerability of coastal nesting sites. But commercial fishing was a relative latecomer.

Fishing began in earnest in the 1950s as long-line and drift-net fleets sought profit in open ocean species such as tuna, swordfish, marlin and shark. By the 1980s, they were everywhere. The huge collateral damage done by these fisheries soon caused alarm. Drift nets spread lethal curtains tens of miles long killing indiscriminately, taking turtles, whales and dolphins alongside the target fish. They were banned by the UN in 1992 but long lines studded with tens of thousands of hooks continue the massacre. Enough long lines are set every night to wrap around the globe 500 times.

In a separate development, from the 1960s, Soviet and European vessels began to probe deeper in response to the decline of their shallow water fish stocks. They found riches on the Atlantic frontier, where continental shelves fall away into the deep, and around the summits of submerged offshore mountains. But these fisheries have proved highly vulnerable to overexploitation. Within the space of a few decades, species such as the roundnose grenadier and orange roughy have become so depleted they are considered threatened with extinction.

Deep sea fisheries carry another high cost in loss of coral forests and sponge groves. Life is glacial in the frigid inkiness of the deep, so these habitats have developed over thousands of years, sustained by table scraps sinking from a narrow surface layer where sunlight fuels plant growth. The bottom trawls that are used to catch fish cut down animals that are hundreds or even thousands of years old.

Without ever making a conscious decision to do it, we are losing unseen habitats whose equals on land would include the giant redwood glades of North America, the baobabs of Madagascar and Amazon rainforest.

Where are the regulators in all of this? Many high seas fisheries have little or no protection. Regional fisheries management organisations, where they exist, have been charged by the United Nations with management of fish stocks such as tuna. The best of them are sleeping on the job; the worst, as with the "management" of the endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna, make decisions in the full knowledge that what they are doing is destroying what they are supposed to protect.

Fishing is not the only problem. Remote as they seem, the high seas are no further than anywhere else from the inescapable influence of climate change, nor are they beyond the reach of pollution. Mercury and industrial emissions from power plants and industry shed their toxic loads far out to sea. Chemicals concentrate in the surface layer that separates air from water and can quickly leapfrog across thousands of miles of ocean in wind-whipped aerosols.

Circulating currents gather the floating refuse of modern society into enormous regions that have been dubbed the "great ocean garbage patches". Over the years, drifting plastics fragment into ever-smaller particles that pick up and concentrate chemical pollutants such as mercury and DDT. Small fish mistake plastics for food and pass chemicals up the food chain until they reach the flesh of animals we eat, like tuna and sharks. What goes around comes around.

If this were all we had to fix, it would be challenge enough. But there is more. Climate change is enlarging the deserts of the sea as surely as it is doing so on land. Surface waters of the open ocean have all the light but few nutrients, which severely limits productivity. Most of the time, upward mixing of nutrients is inhibited by a density barrier between the warm and light surface layer and cold, dense water below. Global warming is heating the surface ocean, making it even harder to cross between these layers. This in turn is starving deeper waters of oxygen that has to mix downwards from the atmosphere and surface plants. The living space in the oceans is shrinking.

There is one final blow to the integrity of the oceans that may yet prove the heaviest of all. Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is building up in the sea as well as the atmosphere. There, it forms carbonic acid (as in fizzy drinks). Acid is the nemesis of carbonate, the basic ingredient of chalk and a fundamental building block of ocean life, including shellfish, corals and plankton. If we do nothing to curtail emissions, ocean acidity will soar by the century's end toward levels not experienced for 55 million years in a period of runaway global warming. It is difficult to predict the exact outcome, but let's just say that last time around, corals and chalky plankton suffered badly.

We carry on today much as we have done for thousands of years, using natural resources as if they were endless. But population growth changes everything. We must get to grips with the consequences of our planetary dominance, otherwise the consequences will master us.

Out of sight and out of mind they may be, but the high seas are vital to everyone. By virtue of their sheer size they play a dominant role in the processes that keep our world habitable. They are too big for us to let them fail. The Global Oceans Commission has urgent work to do.

OceansMarine lifeConservationFishingCallum Roberts
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Fishing for plastic to save our seas | Callum Roberts

An EU plan to pay fishermen to catch plastic will help save our waters from waste while providing fleets with alternative income

Rarely has a TV campaign been won so convincingly. In January this year, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight programme persuaded over 600,000 of us to support a ban on the wasteful practice of throwing dead fish back into the sea. The European commission listened and has announced it intends to ban discarding fish.

For some peculiar reason, the fishing industry's reaction to the commission's announcement was not as warm as you might have expected. A discard ban will put many out of business, we now hear, presumably because many of the fish caught as bycatch are smaller and less valuable than the ones fishermen land today. So in announcing the plan, Maria Damanaki, the European fisheries commissioner, sought to soften the blow. Under her proposal, fishermen may be paid to fish for plastic instead.

Plastic fisheries sound daft, but the idea is far from silly. Our seas are awash with plastic bottles, bags, nappies, discarded fishing nets, ropes and thousands of other bits and pieces – the flotsam of modern life. By 2008, the latest year for which I have a figure, 260m tonnes of plastics were made using 8% of global oil production in raw materials and energy. The curve of production over time bends upwards like a cliff face, increasing by 9% per year. The stark reality of this ever-steepening upward climb is that more plastic was made in the first 10 years of this century than all of the plastic ever created up to the year 2000.

Deliberate dumping of plastic at sea has been banned since 1998, but the law is hard to police. The amount of rubbish picked from British beaches in cleanups sponsored by the Marine Conservation Society increased 77% between 1994 and 2009, much of it chucked from ships. Rivers add mindboggling amounts of plastic into the sea daily; much of it soon comes back to a coast near you. Every year, about 2,000 items of rubbish (most of it plastic) washes ashore for each kilometre of beach in Europe. The Mediterranean is worst affected with up to 18,000 pieces per kilometre per year, so it isn't surprising that the European commission plan to test their plastic fishing proposal there first. Even the deep sea is not beyond reach. About half of plastics sink, and submarine pilots regularly see bags float past 1,000 metres down.

Plastic at sea isn't just unsightly. Many seabirds, turtles, fish and others mistake plastic for food: 19 out of every 20 guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Britain's real fish fight | Callum Roberts

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall rightly criticises fishing practices – but a discard ban must be joined by other tough measures

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has set his sights on several of the fishing industry's dirty secrets in a series aired this week on Channel 4's three-part Big Fish Fight series. The first programme looked at the practice of discarding, whereby fishermen are compelled by EC rules to throw away perfectly good fish that they have no quota for, while pursuing fish that they do. The images of basket after basket of wholesome fish flung back dead were powerful and disturbing, and Fearnley-Whittingstall was right to shine a spotlight on this disgraceful practice.

But he left the impression that the seas around Britain are bursting with fish. They are not. Stocks have fallen dramatically, and across the board. The scale of this decline can only be grasped by taking a long view. The UK government started to keep fisheries records in the 1880s. Hugh sailed aboard a bottom trawler that catches a mix of fish in nets dragged over the seabed, so let's look at the fortunes of this particular industry. In 1889, the year records began, we landed 4.3 times more fish into England and Wales than we do today from a fleet made up mainly of small sailing boats.

Landings peaked in 1938, at 14 times more fish than we land today. But today's boats are far more powerful than those used in the past. When you take into account this difference, the contrast is even more stark. Peak landings per unit of fishing power were 17 times higher in 1889 than they are today. In other words, fishermen have to work 17 times harder to catch fish now compared to 1889 (or rather their machines and electronics do). The simple reason is that stocks have declined massively.

Another strand of Channel 4's Fish Fight airs on Friday 14 January with Heston Blumenthal's Fishy Feast. It is often said by celebrity chefs that if consumers sought a greater variety of fish it would alleviate overfishing of traditional favourites such as cod and haddock. But variety of choice will not protect fish if the alternatives are themselves overfished. Blumenthal scores a spectacular own goal in choosing to cook wolffish cheeks. Wolffish have declined in English and Welsh trawl fisheries by 96% since 1889. They are highly vulnerable to overfishing and the species has been so depleted on the other side of the Atlantic it has been declared endangered in Canadian waters. The level of decline in Europe is sufficient to qualify them for the Red List of threatened species.

What can be done? European fishing rules are meant to help stocks recover, but they fail both fish and the industry scandalously, heaping shame upon all involved. Total allowable catches – which are divided among boats as quotas – form the central plank of the common fisheries policy, but are fundamentally flawed. They limit landings, not what can be caught and killed, so they offer virtually no protection to fish stocks. The consequences are reckless wastage of discarded fish, fuel burned and labour spent for no purpose and the continued decline of stocks.

In my view, the 2012 reform of the common fisheries policy must throw out landings quotas and introduce an outright ban on discards. But there is no point swapping one failed policy for another. Regulations must promote stock recovery, not encourage more rapid removal of fish. So a discard ban must go hand-in-hand either with a tough restriction on time spent fishing, or quotas on how much can be caught (as opposed to landed).

And to safeguard threatened species such as wolffish, we need marine protected areas within which no fishing is allowed. Taken together, these measures would lead to more fish in the sea and a more sustainable industry. Then consumers could stop worrying about what they were eating and chefs could get on with producing mouthwatering meals.

FishingHugh Fearnley-WhittingstallFishTelevisionEuropean UnionCallum Roberts
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds