Practice and Theory
I’ve written before about the huge gulf between the rhetoric of the EU, and the EU in practice. Like many others, I have a feeling of despair about the destruction of many African fishing economies by the practice of the EU despite its caring rhetoric about African poverty, and also the media’s almost complete lack of interest in this discarding of human life. So it was heartening to see an article in The Grauniad (May 11th) on just this subject. OK, it was really about a slightly crackpot scheme to preserve fish stocks, but note these lines.
Ninety years of industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. ... when serious shortages in traditional stocks around Europe began to be commercially apparent 30 years ago, the trawler fleets began to move south. (remember the UK handed over 80% of the EU’s fishing grounds, previously supporting a large, well managed UK fishing industry, to European government control when the UK joined the ECC in 1972)
and now what the EU is really all about. It is a protectionist regime that is overly influenced by large industrial and other pressure groups.
The United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, signed in 1979, extended national rights over fisheries to 200 miles from a country's coasts. But it included a provision that, if fish stocks in that zone were surplus to national needs, the country could sell its rights to outsiders. That convention allowed cash-strapped and sometimes corrupt countries in west Africa to raise funds by letting the industrial trawler fleets in. Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU's own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck.
In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years' fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts, for just $4m a year. In 2006, access for 43 giant EU factory fishing vessels to Mauritania's long coastline was bought for £24.3m a year.
the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas (ICCAT)
ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, is an obscure - if you're not in the tuna business - Madrid-based organisation that spends some €2.3m (£1.8m) of EU taxpayers' money a year collating and commissioning scientific research, and holding meetings for the 45 nations with an interest in the tuna-type species in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. ... This is all in the cause of conserving tuna, of course. Which ICCAT, all observers agree, has utterly failed to do. In fact, the commission is a joke: known in the business as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas. Sergi Tudela, the World Wildlife Fund's head of fisheries for the Mediterranean, doesn't find it funny.
and, applying the usual EU law of unexpected consequences:
It's estimated that these deals have put 400,000 west African fishermen out of work; some of them now take to the sea only as ferrymen for desperate would-be migrants to the Canary Islands and Europe. And among the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.
So next time you hear about the wave of North African immigrants, fleeing to Europe in inadequate boats and being washed up on southern Mediterranean shores, and Italian mayors banning them from their towns, have pity on them. and we want this Brussels government to run our country? Why Oh why? Please tell me someone.
(Thanks to EURef for the Heads up)
