The Wildlife Trust's North Sea Wildlife Project

Fish Fight - Do your bit! Watch on Channel 4 this week

Help change the way fisheries are managed by signing up to the fish fight campaign - http://www.fishfight.net/

For the past few months, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been travelling around the UK meeting fishermen, marine conservationists, politicians, supermarkets bosses, and of course fish-eating members of the public.

You can find out all Hugh's experience, and how it has changed the way he thinks about fish, in the Channel 4 series, Hugh’s Fish Fight, to be broadcast in January 2011.

Episodes will be shown on 11th, 12th and 13th January, all at 9pm on Channel 4.

fishfight.net  is the website and campaign hub which will accompany the series and continue its work over the coming months. It’s supported by a wide coalition of environmental NGO’s and, we hope, by a growing number of fishermen and policy makers too.

The first element of the campaign – and the first area where we are looking for public support – is the issue of discards at sea. More elements to the campaign will follow in the New Year (we will be looking at aquaculture, particularly salmon farming, and also at the environmental issues surrounding the global tuna fisheries). For now though, here is some background to the campaign to eliminate discards.

• According to an EU paper in 2007, between 40% and 60% of all fish caught by trawls are being discarded. Experts agree that the figure is at least as bad now as it was then. (We have settled on the figure of half, which many believe is conservative). Discarding is not limited to the North Sea, it’s a massive problem throughout EU waters. Some of these discards are undersized fish, and some of them are species for which there is currently little market. But much of it is “over-quota” fish: prime cod, haddock, coley, whiting, plaice, and other major food species, for which the fishermen have run out of quota.
• But in the pursuit of other fish for which they do still have quota, they cannot avoid catching large numbers of the “wrong” species. It’s an inherent problem in what is known as a “mixed fishery”. The fish are being thrown away because to land them would be illegal. Only a tiny proportion of these fish will survive. For obvious reasons, fishermen hate discards. Conservationists hate them too.
• Even politicians don’t like them. But they are an unavoidable consequence of the current Common Fisheries Policy and the quota system. The very same rules that have been devised with the aim of protecting stocks (principally quotas and minimum landing sizes) have become the reason that so much fish is being thrown back into the sea.
• The CFP is under review and due to be reformed in the coming months. The fishfight campaign aims to influence this reform. We do not seek to dictate policy, merely the consequences of policy.

 

• By signing up to this campaign you will be writing directly to the policy makers in Europe. And you will help to ensure that a reformed CFP has the elimination of discards as a primary objective. Thank you so much for your support. Please spread the word!

By supporting this campaign, your name will be added to a letter to be sent to Commissioner Maria Damanaki, members of the Common Fisheries Policy Reform Group, and all MEPs. Click here to read that letter.

The Fish Fight Campaign will officially launch with a broadcast of “Hugh’s Fish Fight” presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in January 2011.