Agreement with Norway on a reciprocal fisheries agreement for 2011 was reached at the end of a second round of talks in Bergen on the 3rd December. A strong NFFO team attend both rounds of the negotiations in Brussels and Bergen.
The negotiations set the total allowable catches (TACs) for jointly managed stocks in the North Sea, and also the terms for an exchange of quotas between Norway, within the longstanding EEA Agreement. They also seek to coordinate management measures, as far as is practicable.
North Sea Joint Stocks
Subject to final confirmation when the agreed record is circulated, the following are the (provisional) percentage changes to the North Sea jointly managed stocks from 2010 to 2011:
Cod -20%
Haddock -5%
Saithe -13%
Whiting + 15%
Plaice + 15%
Herring + 21.9%
North Sea Cod /Catch Quotas
The 20% reduction in TAC for North Sea cod TAC results from the application of the EU/Norway management plan to ICES advice for 2011. After several years in which fishing mortality on cod has fallen, and the spawning stock has rebuilt, ICES assessments suggest that recovery has stalled. Time will tell whether this is an accurate picture but the issue of “unaccounted removals” – discards, natural mortality, unrecorded catches – remains a central question. What is beyond question is the high level of discards that will result from setting the TAC at this level. It is clearer than ever that cutting the TAC (and in the case of the EU fleets) reducing the number of permissible fishing days is a wholly inadequate and in many respects counterproductive management response to the situation that we now find ourselves in.
http://www.nffo.org.uk/news/commision_discards.html
One attempt to break with this cycle of failure has been the trials that have taken place this year on fully documented fisheries, otherwise known as catch quotas. But despite promising results in terms of reducing discards, it was only possible to secure an additional 12% of the TAC as incentive for vessels in the catch quota project in 2011. This is up from 5% in 2010 but cannot be described as representing a dynamic and vigorous response to the scale of the problem.
Despite its own theoretical discard ban and rhetoric about discards over the years, Norway has not been as supportive as it might have been on this important new initiative and used the EU request, in its customary way, to increase its negotiating leverage to secure additional quotas for its pelagic fleets.
Catch quotas are not a panacea but they do represent a promising and practical approach to discard reduction, tailored to the conditions in the North Sea cod fishery. Norway made the EU negotiators sweat to obtain the additional quota for the project – this at a time when it is projected that discards of North Sea cod will reach 39,000 tonnes in 2011.
Whiting: a turning point?
After 5 years of successive reductions in the TAC for whiting, generating huge discards on the west side of the North Sea, an important turning point was reached during the negotiations with Norway. A proposed 15% reduction in the TAC was turned into a 15% increase, and work has begun on the development of a long term management plan for this fishery. This will not signal an end to discards in the whiting fishery – with all the wasted value and resource that that implies – but it does suggest that we could see a more positive approach in the future.
In an almost text-book example of how the RACs and fisheries scientists can work together to deliver better management outcomes:
The issue was raised and discussed in depth with ICES and CEFAs scientist, Chris Darby, at the meeting of the North Sea RAC Demersal Working Group held in Brussels on 15th November
When EU and Norway met in Brussels during the same week there was outline agreement that a 15% reduction in the whiting TAC was required to reflect successive years of poor recruitment, despite the evidence that this would only increase discards in this fishery
In an important initiative, CEFAS/ICES revisited the ICES science on whiting in light of the discussions in the NSRAC and an earlier EU/ Norway request that ICES develop an interim management plan for North Sea whiting
A highly persuasive scientific presentation was made by Chris Darby to a plenary session of the second round of EU/Norway negotiations in Bergen. This indicated that an interim long term management plan with a target mortality similar to that employed for the haddock and saithe fisheries, would imply a substantially increased TAC for whiting – in the region of + 26%.
The Norwegian scientist advising the Norwegian delegation confirmed that in his view this was a reasonable and well founded approach
The negotiations had to decide on a TAC for 2011 in light of this new approach
The Commission argued for a 15% increase, in line with its own self-denying ordinance that TAC changes should usually be limited to 15%
Norway as part of its negotiating tactics to secure leverage for pelagic stocks initially resisted the new approach but then conceded when its demands were at least partially met, in the final stages of the negotiations.
No one is under any illusion that the problem of the management measures to deal with the spatial distribution of the whiting stock has been resolved at a stroke and that whiting discards will disappear as a result of the EU Norway agreement. However in these circumstances a 15% increase for 2011 has to be better than a 15% decrease. And the ICES interim management plan, and the development of North Sea RAC advice on a LTMP for whiting over the next few months, offers the prospect for a better future for those vessels which have been forced to discard whiting regularly and on a massive scale. In the meantime the Federation will be pressing Defra to secure any additional whiting quota available from international swaps and the industrial fishery.
Balance
Securing the balance in cod equivalents between the quotas given and received between EU and Norway has become increasingly difficult in recent years as the availability of underutilised quota on the EU side has become tight for a number of reasons. The divergent trends in the blue whiting (down)and North East Arctic cod stocks (up) has brought the issue to a head, although the strains have been mounting in the last few years.
The implications for this impasse could not be more serious. The EEA agreement obliges Norway to offer a fixed percentage of the NE Arctic cod TAC to the EU, in recognition that Norway benefits to a huge degree to access to the EU market. But that cod must be balanced in terms of quota going from the EU to Norway. Without the currency to pay Norway, the whole basis of the agreement that has stood since the early 1990s begins to unravel.
The EU does not receive its full allocation of North East Arctic cod, guaranteed under the EEA agreement
Internal tensions within the EU increase between those member states (and parts of member states) who benefit from the transfers of NE Arctic cod and those member states (and parts of member states) who resist use of those (mainly pelagic) allocations to pay Norway
Norway, whose overwhelming negotiating objective is to secure pelagic quotas from the EU and access to EU waters to catch them, becomes more difficult to negotiate with at a time when solidarity on the Western mackerel issue is paramount
The UK’s distant water fleet will face a reduction of quota in the region of 40% in 2011 as a result of the failure of the EU to find currency to balance the agreement at its full level. This will have serious consequences for the companies, vessels and crews involved.
These immediate consequences are serious enough but also carry profound implications for the type of agreement between Norway and the EU will exist in the future. A reciprocal agreement at a very low level of reciprocity raises questions over whether it is worth it for worth parties. The EU Norway agreement could become a very different arrangement in the future.
Management Plans
Long term management plans (LTMSPs) are a good thing. They provide for stability, clarity and a move away from short-term decision-making with all the problems that they bring. Well designed LTMPs can even out recruitment fluctuations and establish safe levels of harvesting the resource that bring economic benefits in the long term.
It has to be recognised however that LTMPs in the EU are in their infancy. LTMPs agreed between EU and Norway to date have been a fairly crude set of harvest control rules that do not adequately take into account other aspects of the fisheries concerned, not least the economic dimension.
This year’s EU/Norway negotiations threw up two problem areas with regard to LTMPs:
North Sea Herring, where the Commission argued that once agreed a LTMP should not be altered until formally reviewed according to a timetable; and Norway and most EU pelagic interests, who argued that updated ICES advice that detected an underestimation of recruitment should be adjusted for in setting the TAC for 2011. If accepted, this would mean a + 30% increase in TAC rather than a +15% increase.
North Sea Saithe, a stock assessed to be at MSY levels yet on the basis of weak recruitment assessments faces a 26% reduction in TAC over two years on the basis of the EU/Norway management plan for saithe. This carries severe economic consequences that seem out of balance with the healthy state of the stock.
More sophisticated LTMPs are required that integrate economic and social dimensions into management decisions and give stakeholders a greater say in shaping them. The degree of inter-annual flexibility within LTMPs and how to deal with corrections in scientific advice are clearly issues that need to be addressed as more sophisticated LTMPs evolve with the participation of the RACs.
In time-honoured fashion, the herring issue was settled by a fudge (the TAC was set at a 21.9% increase), and the saithe issue by ignoring it (the TAC was reduced by 13% for the second year).
Real Time Closures
Norwegian attempts to secure a redesign of the EU RTC legislation were successfully resisted as being premature and inappropriate. There will be further discussions on the subject during the course of the coming year.
