No more fish in the sea

The ocean is a big place, yet not big enough for the fish to escape the great industrial fishing net. Most people barely notice: you can still get a piece of battered cod at the local fish and chip shop, tinned fish is plentiful on supermarket shelves, packets of frozen fish shoal up in the freezer cabinets. But all is not well with marine fish stocks as I’ve written about a few times. If anything the situation is worse since leaving the EU. Myopic commercial trawlermen were loudly in favour of Brexit because they swallowed the falsehood that we’d rescue stocks by keeping all those foreigners from fishing UK waters. Hasn’t worked out like that. Apart from losing European markets, valuable to UK fishermen, our catch quotas have remained well above sustainable levels and thus stocks have not recovered. The EU is usually better than the UK on environmental policy.

Mackerel is the latest species to collapse. I remember setting up the beachcasters one evening some years ago on the south coast. As we waited for dusk to fall before casting for bass, a great eruption began in the water close to shore as the mackerel chased the whitebait. That’s all in the past. Supermarkets have started selling an inferior product called jack mackerel caught off Chile (which are not actually mackerel) in response to stocks of the familiar Atlantic species falling by 75% over the last ten years. The Atlantic fishery no longer has the Marine Stewardship Council certification, which the supermarkets to their credit require. The total catch last year in the European Economic Zone was a huge 232,000 tonnes (UK quota is 299,000: the ICES recommended quota is 174,000). No surprise that stocks have fallen so much around UK waters. All down to overfishing and governments ignoring science advice to reduce quotas. Perhaps supermarket policy will shrink the market sufficiently to help stocks recover. Not that commerce has a great record in conservation.

Cod stocks in British waters have long been in a terrible state, along with the rest of the North Atlantic. Iceland is the only country I know of to manage its stocks sustainably. In the Celtic Sea (west of Cornwall), the cod population has fallen off an undersea cliff — down 96%. ICES has advised that several fisheries around our coast be closed to save stocks from total loss. Policy makers have been slow to react but this year the cod quota was cut by 44%. Better than nothing but hardly 100% as ICES recommended. Even so, Scottish fishermen strongly opposed this. How would they feel if the cod disappeared for good? Seems they are prepared to carry on fishing until doomsday, an inexplicable act against their own self interest as well as the environment.

Landings of Atlantic northwest cod in million tonnes (From Wiki)

I could mention salmon here but there is little to add over my previous posts, other than to remind anyone interested that when avaricious trawlers are dragging up the cod faster than they can breed, the men in sou’westers won’t be too troubled about bycatch or a few (thousand?) salmon otherwise ‘accidentally’ caught. We landlubbers, however, can deny them a market for their ill-advised catches by following MSC recommendations.

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Careful who you buy from

If the environment is destroyed, fish disappear from rivers and oceans, the human race becomes extinct it will be in large measure down to big corporations. Everyone knows the years of denials from the tobacco industry about the health risks of smoking long after these were established beyond any doubt. This last summer has with great force brought home the consequence of climate breakdown, yet the big oil companies continue to lie and distort the undeniable truth of this. And not forgetting the vile privatised water companies which have polluted our rivers in a relentless hunger for high profits. The same plutocrats attempt to brainwash the public through the newspapers and social media platforms they own. Bezos, owner of Amazon, the Acme Corporation from the Road Runner cartoons made real, owns the Washington Post and has stopped the paper reporting on climate change. More fools those who swallow their propaganda. I never buy from Amazon.

What is the corporate influence in fishing tackle manufacture? We think back to when tackle makers were a cottage industry, small workshops that built split cane rods, machined reels, turned floats, but these have largely gone or been subsumed into larger businesses. Traditional names like Hardy, Shakespeare and Abu are now subsidiaries of Pure Fishing, an American company. But this in turn is owned by Sycamore Partners, an American private equity firm. Private equity pools money from institutions and the wealthy to buy up companies. The modus operandi involves borrowing heavily and loading companies with debt coupled with asset stripping and aggressive cost cuts, all to generate short-term profits. Companies caught in their net often go to the wall and Sycamore Partners is no different . US senator, Bernie Saunders, recently urged the group to reverse its decision to strip workers of paid holiday.

Other corporate conglomerates in the fishing world are public Rapala VMC (Rapala, Storm and others) private equity groups Rather Outdoors (Browning, Preston Innovations, Fox, . . .) and Simms. Daiwa and Shimano are both public (owned by shareholders) Japanese conglomerates. So many of the famous names are part of big business. The question is whether we should buy stuff from them. I am disinclined to get anything from the Pure Fishing stable due to its ownership though I think the major Japanese companies are ethical. Are there any of the small-scale fishing tackle firms left? Yes there are. Guideline is a family owned company in Finland. Coarse fishing companies include Nash and Gardner, although some, Fox for example, have also been gobbled up by the private equity vulture. Drennan International, which began in a garage and is still managed by Peter Drennan, remains a private company though has now outsourced manufacturing across several ‘economically competitive’ (i.e. cheap labour) countries. Fulling Mill, now bought out by an ex Tory MP and placed within a holding company, apparently formed specifically for that purpose, continues to sell flies tied in Kenya, the fly-tying capital of the world. Then there are ethical Patagonia, environmental stalwart Orvis and more. So alternatives to big corporations are out there.

I imagine many anglers don’t worry too much about the origin of the kit they buy. But we should, as with all our purchases. Our future depends on it. If I buy another fly rod, I’ll be looking more at Guideline than Hardy. Consumers do have power.

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