This week sees the start of a major Channel 4 campaign focused on fish and fishing.
In a series of TV programmes over the coming week celebrity chef big guns, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Arthur Potts Dawson, each focus on some aspect of the fishing industry and of fish consumption, mixing campaigning zeal with practical recipes using underutilised species.
The fishing industry is still weighing up whether this attention is something to be welcomed and embraced, or something to be feared. The answer is likely to be, like celebrity itself, a mixed blessing.
Certainly, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign on discards has so far turned a useful spotlight on the scale of discarding generated by the requirements of the Common Fisheries Policy. It has highlighted the gulf between the Commission’s hand-wringing over discards and its practical policies which make large-scale discarding a legal obligation for vessels in mixed fisheries. It also has drawn attention to the hugely encouraging progress that can be made in reducing other types of discards when the right approach is taken – in for example the 50% project.
