The Scottish trawl fishing lobby has recently declared that there are “more fish in the sea than ever“. We consider the facts behind the headlines.

“Another component of the threadbare dossier produced by the greens to attack the industry is “over-fishing. This myth really needs to be put to bed, once and for all.”

Elspeth MacDonald, chief executive of Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, The Scotsman, August 2021

In recent months, some of the main trawler lobbyists, the Shetland Fishermen’s Association and its parent organisation, the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF), have made far-fetched statements that dismiss overfishing as a “myth”, environmental concerns as “misguided” and amazingly ask whether “environmental NGOs are recommending mass starvation?” – this last statement is from organisations who have lobbied for their members to land more than 45% of their catch directly to foreign ports, bypassing our own food system and workers in Scotland entirely.

These comments are apparently aimed to distract from calls for parts of the fishing industry to reduce its carbon footprint and environmental impact. The industry lobbyists instead claim that “North Sea fish stocks are in a tremendously healthy state“, or recovering and indeed that “there are more fish in the sea than ever”. It is vitally important to assess whether these statements are factually correct. [Read more…]

The new SNP-Green deal is breaking new ground for Scottish politics. It has been cautiously welcomed from some environmental quarters, but does it promise anything new for the sustainability of our seas, and can it deliver?

In the first deal of its kind in Scottish and UK politics, the SNP and the Scottish Green Party have announced a formal power-sharing arrangement. The deal was months in the making and it was reported that marine and fisheries issues were some of the thorny sticking points that held up the cooperation deal negotiations as the parties struggled to reconcile their differences.

The tensions were arguably inevitable: the SNP’s manifesto position promised measures to put “marine ‘assets” at the heart of the economy “doubling turnover, GVA and international trade in a decade”, with little focus on environmental safeguards. And this has likely been in direct conflict with Scottish Green party commitments to ensure sustainability for the longer-term by setting “mandatory catch limits” and urgently reducing the impact of damaging industries by “excluding dredging and trawling from much of our inshore waters… with the default being within 3 miles of Scotland’s shore.” The text of the deal sets out what they agree to collaborate on within specific areas, and under the heading ‘marine environment’ promises a “step change in marine protection”, but what does this actually mean? And does it do so? [Read more…]

Redacted documents disclosed through a Freedom of Information request reveal just 14 REM installations on Scottish dredge fleet since 2018 despite £2m of public money and a secretive Government-run scallop industry group

The Scottish Government has been promising to fit Remote Electronic Monitoring (REM)* systems to the Scottish scallop dredge fleet since 2014. This has been made more imperative by ongoing reports of illegal dredging inside marine protected areas (there were six such reports between March and November 2020 during the peak of the pandemic).

In 2015 Scottish Ministers committed to establishing vessel tracking on Scottish Fishing boats “by 2020”, to improve enforcement of MPAs & better understand the fishing “footprint”

Here’s what they’ve said about that over the past 5 years… pic.twitter.com/vPS8rgbldj

— Open Seas (@TheOpenSeas) June 26, 2020

In 2018 the then Cabinet Secretary Fergus Ewing committed £1.5m of public money to buy scallop dredge companies the tracking devices – this shifted to £2m when they finally agreed the contract. In 2019 the former fisheries Minister Mr Ewing set up something called the Scottish Scallop Sector Working Group – the SSSWG. However, no information about this group was made public. In 2019 a Parliamentary question at Holyrood made its existence public, but no other information was shared.

Earlier this year, we contacted the Scottish Government to request [Read more…]

Having worked on sustainability concerns regarding destructive scallop and scampi fisheries for the past five years we have sadly arrived at the point where we are now unconvinced that the industry and government are able to resolve them.

We are now recommending consumers take more concerted public action to put pressure on the sourcing of some of the most environmentally damaging fisheries operating around Scotland and the UK. That is why this month we have launched the #EndSeafoodGreenwash campaign.

We’re hoping to empower people who love our seas and seafood to send a clear message to seafood companies that they have an urgent role to play in halting environmental harm in our seas caused by the products they sell.

Scottish scallop and scampi fisheries have had serious [Read more…]

The new documentary Seaspiracy has sparked a huge amount of debate about the impacts of fishing in our ocean. Many have called it out as alarmist, especially in its apparent conclusion that people should stop eating fish. As a charity that seeks to expose unacceptable fisheries but also promote sustainable seafood we don’t agree with every aspect of the film, but in its broad sweep of the issues, the documentary highlights some of the major sustainability problems that are sadly of concern right here in Scotland and the UK…

Once relegated as a niche environmental issue, Seaspiracy has catapulted the ecological decline of the world’s oceans to public prominence, beaming it to a mainstream Netflix audience that is increasingly sceptical of big business and hungry for consumer information.

Seaspiracy tries to cover a lot of ground and begins very much at entry level, assuming little knowledge of the main problems affecting our [Read more…]

The Scottish Government’s new ‘Fisheries Management Strategy’. has been long in the making. Has it been worth the wait? Unfortunately it signals a quietly regressive approach which risks deregulating our fishing industry, back-sliding on EU rules, and opens the door to overfishing.

This new ‘Fisheries Management Strategy’  represents the biggest change in fisheries management in a generation, as Scotland leaves the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy and follows this new Strategy. 

Despite the gravity of this change, there has been no parliamentary opportunity to scrutinise the Strategy, or the detail of fisheries management more generally. A Ministerial statement in the Scottish Parliament scheduled for Tuesday 15th December was cancelled and MSPs have since had no opportunity to debate it.

On the surface, the Strategy appears to be a pioneering and innovative in its aim to make Scotland a  ‘world-leading fishing nation,’ but what stands out is its failure to even mention the declining health of our marine environment and the poor condition of many fish populations, let alone set out a plan for their recovery. Scotland’s west coast cod populations have declined dramatically and remain in poor condition. ICES now advises “there should be zero catch in each of the years 2021 and 2022”. So while industry and government have spent time haggling about the share of fish stocks in the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, a more foundational concern is the health of the fish populations themselves. [Read more…]

A new ten-year assessment reaches the stark conclusion that in many respects the health of Scotland’s marine environment is still deteriorating. What actions does our government need to take to actively recover our seas?

As one decade ends and another begins, the Scottish Marine Assessment 2020 has finally been published, and sadly confirms what many now know – that our seas are still in environmental decline. Despite the bold intentions of the Marine Scotland Act in 2010 to “protect and enhance” our seas and kickstart a recovery from spiralling fish populations and vanishing habitats, this much-needed ‘enhancement’ is simply not happening – the Assessment documents many symptoms of environmental deterioration.

The Assessment confirms serious declines in biogenic seabed habitats (previously revealed in a leaked Government report) and makes similar findings for seabed habitats generally throughout Scotland’s inshore seas. It also confirmed that many of Scotland’s fish populations such as cod, whiting and herring, once mainstay stocks for the Scottish fishing industry, remain in poor or even declining condition. Declines are recorded in ‘species richness’ and  ‘species diversity’ indicators for fish, particularly in offshore areas. [Read more…]

Scotland’s fisheries are a public resource and for decades now have been mismanaged – both environmentally and economically. Here are some numbers that might help put political debate around fishing in context and explain why fundamental reform of our fisheries management is urgent and in the public interest… [Read more…]