— November - December 2009
few miles from Cardigan Bay in Wales.
Whenever I can get away, I take my kayak down
to the beach and launch it through the waves.
Often I take a handline with me, in the hope of
catching some mackerel or pollock. On the water,
sometimes five kilometres from the coast, sur-
rounded by gannets and shearwaters, I feel closer
to nature than at any other time.
Last year, I was returning to shore through
a lumpy sea. I was metres from the beach
and beginning to worry about the size of the
breakers when I heard a great whoosh behind
me. Sure that a wave was about to crash over my
head, I ducked. But nothing happened. I turned
round. Right under my paddle, a hooked grey
fin emerged. It disappeared. A moment later, a
bull bottlenose dolphin exploded from the water,
almost over my head. As he curved through the
air, we made eye contact. If there is one image
that will stay with me for the rest of my life, it is
of that sleek gentle monster, watching me with
his wise little eye as he flew past my head. I have
never experienced a greater thrill, even when I
first saw an osprey flying up the Dyfi estuary with
a flounder in its talons.
The Cardigan Bay dolphins are one of the
only two substantial resident populations left
in British seas. It is partly for their sake that most
of the coastal waters of the bay are classified as
special areas of conservation (SACs). This grants
them the strictest protection available under EU
law. The purpose of SACs is to prevent “the dete-
rioration of natural habitats … as well as distur-
bance of the species for which the areas have been
designated”.
Why is no one brave enough to stand up to the fishing industry?
g e o r g e m o n b i o t
Monbiot
Fishing Trawler, Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford
village_oct_09.indd 60 27/10/2009 15:39:28
That looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t
it? The bay is strictly protected. It can’t be dam-
aged, and the dolphins and other rare marine
life can’t be disturbed. So why the heck has a
fleet of scallop dredgers been allowed to rip
it to pieces?
When the season closed this summer,
boats were raking the bay, including places
within the SACs, with steel hooks and chain
mats. The dredges destroy everything: all the
sessile life of the seabed, the fish that take refuge
in the sand; the spawn they lay there, reefs, boul-
der fields, marine archaeology - any feature that
harbours life. In some cases, they penetrate the
seafloor to a depth of three feet. It is ploughed,
levelled and reduced to desert. It will take at least
years for parts of the ecosystem to recover;
but the structure of the seabed is destroyed for-
ever. The noise of the dredges pounding and
grinding over the stones could scarcely be bet-
ter calculated to disturb the dolphins.
The boats are not resident here. They move
around the coastline trashing one habitat after
another. They will fish until there is nothing
left to destroy then move to the next function-
ing ecosystem. If, in a few decades, the scal-
lops here recover, they’ll return to tear this
place up again.
The economic damage caused by these
boats is far greater than the money they make.
They wreck all the other fisheries; not only
because they destroy the habitats and kill the
juvenile fish, but also because they rip out the
crab and lobster pots they cross. We deplore
slash and burn farming in the rainforests for its
short-termism and disproportionate destruc-
tion. But this is just as bad.
Ever since the boats arrived, local people,
led by the Friends of Cardigan Bay, have been
campaigning to stop this pillage. After months
of dithering, in March the Countryside Council
for Wales advised the regional fisheries com-
mittee to stop the dredging. The committee’s
chief executive refused on the grounds that its
powers “are not terrifically explicit” and “the
precautionary principle is a vague term, and we
don’t really know how we define it”. He post-
poned any decision until June th - which is a
fortnight after the season ended. In years
of journalism, I have not come across a starker
example of bureaucratic cowardice.
What hold does the fishing industry have
over our ministers and officials? Does it sink
the bodies of their political opponents? Does
it supply them with call girls and cocaine? The
UK fishing sector has an annual turnover of
£m a year. This is less than half the size of
the potato processing industry. Yet no one has
the guts to defy it.
The story is the same all over the world. The
End of the Line is an excoriating, shocking film
recently released about the collapse of global
fisheries, and the utter uselessness of the peo-
ple who are supposed to protect them. It follows
the journalist Charles Clover as he struggles to
understand why no one is prepared to act. After
several years of trying, he talks to the manager
of Nobu restaurants, to ask why he is still selling
meat from one of the most endangered species
on earth, the bluefin tuna. The man refuses to
take it off the menu, but says he’ll warn his cus-
tomers that bluefin is “environmentally chal-
lenged”. But why is it left to restauranteurs to
decide whether or not an endangered species
should be allowed to survive?
As the film shows, the EU’s scientists
recommend a bluefin catch one and a half times
as big as it should be; the European Commission
then doubles it and the fishermen then take
twice as much as the Commission allows. The
Mediterranean fleet now catches one third of
that sea’s entire bluefin tuna population every
year: at current catch rates, it will be extinct by
. There’s a total absence of enforcement,
as even the most blatant illegal practices, like
using spotter planes to find the shoals, are
ignored by fisheries officials. Worse still, these
pirate boats are subsidised by us. Aside from
payments by national governments, fishing
fleets in Europe are being given €.bn of EU
money over seven years. There has been a total
failure to make these payments conditional on
fishing sustainably or even legally.
The EU now recognises that its fisheries
management has been a disaster. Its Green
Paper admits that % of European fish stocks
are overexploited and % have collapsed. Its
quota system encourages the dumping of mil-
lions of tonnes of dead fish at sea, while its
efforts to reduce the fishing fleet’s capacity
haven’t kept pace with technology. “In several
Member States,” the Paper reports, “the cost of
fishing to the public budgets exceeds the total
value of the catches”. In May, European fish-
eries ministers agreed a radical reform of the
Common Fisheries policy by , just in time
for the extinction of the bluefin tuna.
Of course, as I have seen in Cardigan Bay,
it doesn’t matter what they say they’ll do if no
one is prepared to enforce it. Our marine eco-
systems will continue to be ripped apart until
governments stand up to the mysterious power
of the fishermen.
This article first appeared in the Guardian in June 2009.
See also www.monbiot.com
“Dredges destroy everything: all the sessile
life of the seabed, the fish that take refuge
in the sand; the spawn they lay there, reefs,
boulder fields, marine archaeology - any
feature that harbours life.”
tons of Scallops were landed in ports around the Irish coast in . Boats up to
metres towed up to dredges each, fluidising the sea bed as they went, destroying a thriving ecosystem.
The last figures available - - show the catch at a quarter of the figure - tons. While Ireland’s
Marine Institute says that the “management priority must be the reduction of the fishing effort”, the limitation
on days at sea imposed by the EU-led Irish scallop fishermen to blockade Rosslare and Waterford harbours
on a Bank Holiday Monday in .
village_oct_09.indd 61 27/10/2009 15:39:29
