Fishing boats (picture Freefoto.com)
Apparently, there was a campaign launch today by the Taxpayers Alliance, protesting against the EU’s common fishing policy. There are a lot of things wrong with that policy, to be sure, but in the absence of the TPA’s campaign document I can’t comment on the specifics.
What I can do is to set down a few facts about fishing.
Improved productivity costs jobs
The number of people employed in the UK fishing industry has halved since the UK joined the EEC. Sounds bad. However, it halved in the same period of time before Britain joined the EEC. The decline in employment is nothing to do with the EU or the common fishing policy. The reason is technology – satellite navigation, satellite detection of the location of fish stocks, better boats, better nets – a reason which has reduced the level of employment in lots of areas of the economy.
You can’t have everything
Fishing policy anywhere is driven by three factors:
- The desire to reduce costs by improved technology and productivity
- The aim of keeping a high level of employment in the sector
- The need to conserve fish stocks
And the problem is that these three are mutually incompatible: one of them has to give. The same number of people, working more efficiently, will do more work.
Recently, in the EU, it has been the third factor, fish stocks, that has been given the lowest priority. In my view, that’s not the right choice, but critics of the CFP cannot have the perfect policy. They need to tell us whether they think that costs should be inflated, or jobs should be lost, or fish stocks should be imperilled. Which is it?
A national solution won’t work
Fish swim across national borders. They don’t carry passports. Any attempt to conserve fish in British waters alone is going to fail: it has to be a shared European effort.
Furthermore, imagine a British government that did withdraw from the European fishing policy in order to try and protect jobs. Is it going to be tough on allowable quotas? More likely, it will be even looser, allowing bigger quotas, if employment is its primary objective. Leaving the CFP will endanger Britain’s fish stocks, not preserve them.
PDF 
Loading ...
Richard,
There is always a balance between providing a new report in plenty of time and not preempting this morning’s media reports. The report went up yesterday evening and can be found here:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/the-price-of-fish-costing-the-common-fisheries-policy.html
Best,
Matt Sinclair
Research Director, TPA
Having had a look at the Taxpayers Alliance research, I can see that their numbers do not add up. They claim that the total cost of the CFP to Britain is £2.8 billion a year. This is made up of 13 different items, varying from “UK share of support to foreign fisheries industry under EU grants” (£1 million) to “Loss of access to home waters under 200nm principle” (£2.1 billion). Giving the rounding errors involved and difference in the number of significant figures being quoted, it is pretty meaningless to try and add these together to come up with a number. A small error in the largest number will completely swamp the smaller numbers.
And what is that largest number? It is claimed that £2.1 billion is the value of the fish that would be caught by British vessels were the UK to assert a 200 mile limit from which foreigners were excluded. But that’s a gross figure. What would be the cost of going out to catch that much fish? The loss, if there is one, should be the net figure, the profit that would be made. Whatever that figure is, it is a much smaller number, so the TPA does not include it.
Similarly, their estimate of the increased cost to consumers assumes that the cost of catching fish should have risen alongside the cost of producing meat (up around 7 times since 1970) rather than the larger actual increase we have seen (18 times). But that ignores the enormous improvements in efficiency in the meat industry over that time. (Some animal welfare critics think that some of those efficiencies have been earned at too high a cost in suffering, but that is an issue for another time.) To say that the CFP is the sole factor in the price difference is just absurd.
The crucial factor that has affected fish prices is the decline in fish catches because of the decline in fish stocks. Preserving and rebuilding those stocks should be the top priority.
The TPA report concludes that this cannot be done within the Common Fisheries Policy because most of the other member states are not interested in this approach. That’s a political judgement and I don’t think I share it. A major problem has been that there has not been the right political awareness of the fragility of the fish stocks anywhere. Even British politicians, in whom the TPA places such trust, have been happy to see allowable catches set higher than the scientists would recommend.
Interesting read, I like to keep tabs on my fellow English brothers just across the pond. Although it might not be much of an issue for most I did have an issue viewing the article in Firefox for some reason Richard.
Tight Lines and full plates,
Tyler