photo: roberthuffstutter

Having joined ClientEarth’s marine team in 2010, I have survived the buildup to Christmas in previous years blissfully unaware of the political goings-on in Brussels. However, such fisheries-focused dates have taken on a new importance in my diary this year and earlier this week I travelled to Brussels to gain some insight into how some of the most important decisions about fisheries management are made by European Ministers.

In Brussels, fisheries ministers from around the EU are meeting to decide how much fish should be caught in the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Black Sea in 2011. This meeting, the December meeting of the EU’s Fisheries Council, is one of the most important in the European fisheries calendar.

What I saw in Brussels not only served to convince me that the current system of EU Fisheries management is flawed and opaque but hearing politicians openly comparing the way decisions are made by the Fisheries Council to a game of poker confirmed my worst fears that decision makers are knowingly gambling with the future of Europe’s fisheries.

So what happened?

To highlight the fact that in the EU the are too many boats chasing the dwindling numbers of fish, Greenpeace had built a huge replica fishing boat outside the Council’s building which they symbolically decommissioned, calling on the Ministers meeting inside to ‘scrap overcapacity’ in the EU fishing fleet. While ClientEarth doesn’t organise protests (we prefer to use legal arguments and, where necessary, litigation to get the attention of Ministers), public actions such as this are extremely important in attracting media attention and helping to raise public awareness of the dire situation facing Europe’s fisheries.

The main meeting I went to Brussels to take part in was a UK Ministerial stakeholder meeting organised by Defra representatives, it was a chance to ask the UK’s fisheries Minister, Richard Benyon, some questions ahead of or during the Council meeting. This meeting took place towards the end of the day on Monday, after the first Council discussions on fisheries had taken place. This meant the Minister was able to give the assembled stakeholders a very brief update on some elements of the negotiations so far but did raise questions for me about the value of feeding in opinions after negotiations have begun.

My main question for the Minister was whether the Council is discussing, or has even recognised, its legal obligations to manage Europe’s fish stocks to ensure they are at sustainable levels by 2020. Unfortunately the answer I received left me in little doubt that questions of what Ministers are legally required to do are playing little part in the Council’s negotiations.

Fishing industry representatives with many years experience of December Council’s were interested to find out whether the negotiations this year were being conducted differently to in previous years. The Minister acknowledged that, being new to the job, he wasn’t perhaps best placed to answer this but suggested that any differences between negotiations last year and this could be down to different personalities being involved, in particular a change of Fisheries Commissioner leading the European Commission’s negotiating team. He went so far with this analogy as to suggest that the new Fisheries Commissioner, Maria Damanaki, was a ‘different type of poker player’ to her predecessor.

This light-hearted analogy worried me. I’ve worked on fisheries management for long enough to know that decision making in the Council isn’t based on science or logic or any of the other things you’d hope the future of our seas would be based on. Instead it’s based on politics and often comes down to an outright stamina test as Ministers and their aides negotiate into the early hours of a December morning. Concerns such as what is the right thing to do don’t get much of a look in.

Decisions about the future of Europe’s fisheries shouldn’t be affected by the personalities of the individuals involved just as they shouldn’t be prejudiced by national politics or short-term economic interests. They should be based on scientific advice about how best to manage our already depleted fish stocks to ensure a future for both the fish and the fishing industry. Oh, and let’s not forget that those decisions must comply with legal obligations that require EU Ministers to manage fish stocks to achieve certain targets by specified dates.

I brought back from Brussels a renewed determination to do what we can to ensure NGOs are better represented at stakeholder engagement events. This is not because we want to disagree with the fishing industry or the government, in fact quite the opposite; by ensuring NGO’s views are heard we can hopefully improve the environmental awareness of all those involved in fisheries management. We think that this will benefit both fishermen and the marine environment. It will also have the happy side-effect of helping the UK government to maintain its position as a European leader on environmental issues in fisheries management.

I also learned anew this week quite how chaotic decision making within the Council is. The combination of chaos and opacity seen in Council proceedings is dangerous indeed; not only does it seem that decisions are being made based on political criteria influenced by concerns of who said what to whom and when, but we are not even able to challenge our politicians for the part they play in this.

More than ever this week highlighted for me the need to reform the system, to re-write the Common Fisheries Policy, and to ensure this annual cycle of chaotic political negotiations doesn’t continue to dominate European fisheries management. Until that happens, politicians will continue to gamble with the future of our seas and we won’t even know it.