The Common Fisheries Policy of the European Community was debated yesterday in the House of Commons and is on the agenda in Brussels next Monday. When it was established in 1983, it agreed an admirable objective. It has failed to achieve it.
It aimed to adjust two developments which, uncontrolled, threatened to destroy stocks of several fish off the north-western shores of Europe. Overfishing was depleting the numbers of fish faster than restocking could replace them. At the same time, fishing fleets were reducing their capacity only by slow degrees; larger boats and more efficient trawling were making the whole business considerably more effective. In the late 1970s, the stock of herring came close to exhaustion.
Two measures emerged from the horse-trading in Brussels. National catch quotas were tightened so as to protect enough fish to prevent the total elimination of a stock. An incentive scheme was established to help fishermen come out of the industry, so that the fleets began to match both consumer demand and the supply in the sea.
Problems multiplied, however. The EC's policing powers were unequal to the pressures which had built up over the years for stocks to be plundered by several countries at once. The figures for "total allowable catch" (TAC), then divided into national quotas, were set too high to prevent progressive depletion. The growth of interdependence between the European economies and the principles of the single market appeared to sit oddly with the very idea of national quotas. There was a long dispute, which finally reached the European Court, between Britain and Spain over "quota-hopping", the registration of foreign boats in a second country in order to overcome national limits.
The principal goal of any Common Fisheries Policy must be the conservation of fish stocks. It is now clear that this objective cannot be achieved by lightly-policed decommissioning schemes and TACs alone. In other words, the whole EC policy must be overhauled to correct defects which cannot be overcome simply by tightening the quotas. Quite apart from anything else, the methods both legal and illegal which have been used to avoid both the spirit and the letter of the limits show that they can be evaded.
If the fisheries ministers can bring themselves to consider comprehensive reform, they should proceed on several fronts. Quotas must be reduced to forestall a disaster; Mr Gummer should resist disproportionate cuts in British allowances. But a more extensive and effective inspection system is also needed to eliminate widespread abuse throughout Europe. At the same time, governments and the European Commission should reopen the questions of new regulations requiring larger net mesh to avoid the overfishing of young fish.
Seasonal bans have also been proposed as an alternative to simple quotas. Abuse of an earlier generation of schemes to assist those leaving the industry cannot be taken as final. The number of boats in the fleets will have to fall further; there is every reason to try to arrange accountable subsidies to assist this. The expensive problems which have accumulated bear witness to the falseness of the economies made by such decommissioning schemes.
