The idea of capping effort in the UK crab and lobster fisheries has been in circulation for many years without making any significant headway. The scientific argument for a cap is that whilst we don’t know with any degree of precision how close we are to the tipping point, the continuous expansion in fishing effort in the crab and lobster fisheries (measured in terms of the increasing number of pots in the water) could seriously jeopardise stocks if the current favourable environmental conditions are discontinued.
The case is also made that sensible conservation measures taken early are much less difficult for the industry to absorb than when stocks are in decline and the economic pressures greater.
These conservation arguments have been given additional impetus by periodic price collapses in the brown crab market caused by seasonal overproduction in relation to market demand.
For many years the favoured approach advanced by scientists and Defra was the application of a national pot limitation scheme. However, problems foreseen in implementing and enforcing such a national scheme, and strong resistance from some parts of the shellfish sector, have meant that such a national scheme has never reached take off speed; although local pot limitation schemes have been successfully applied in Jersey and Northumbria.
Within Defra policy thinking, pot limitation has now been overtaken by rights-based management as the favoured approach to capping fishing effort. Internationally, within the CFP and within Defra, the widespread view is that defining and allocating specific fishing rights to the industry carries a range of conservation and economic advantages. The case for extending a rights-based approach to the crab and lobster fisheries has been given additional impetus through ministers’ decision (subject to consultation) to address the issue of latent capacity in the under-10m fleet in England through the allocation of defined rights in the form of Fixed Quota Allocations. On the evidence of previous experience, vessels denied access to quota species will immediately, or over time, redirect effort towards non-quota stocks, of which shellfish are currently amongst the most valuable.
