FNI - What's behind the Green Agenda on Fishing?

FISHING NEWS

May 2014 Issue 5 Volume 53 www.intrafish.com

INTERNATIONAL

COME AND MEET MEEET THE INTRAFISH S TEAM AT SEAFOOD EXPO GLOBAL

STAND 5-301

Achievement or disAster What’s behind the green agenda on fishing?

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May 2014

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OPINION Dirty work

FISHING NEWS INTERNATIONAL

Quentin Bates

SCRAPPED WHEELHOUSE: Where is the fishing industry heading?

Fishing News International’s Technical Editor

Is it pure philanthropy, as some would like us to believe, or are there darker forces at play here?

There are organisations funding aggressively anti-fishing NGOs; and their motives are decidedly unclear and likely to stay that way.

We know what these extremely wealthy people are doing, but we don’t know why.

We have to accept that the seabed is becoming an increasingly attractive place for a whole bunch of industries.

Gas, oil and aggregates are there already.

Then there’s minerals, diamonds and few other goodies worth more money than it’s healthy to think about.

In fact, clashes already take place between oil and diamond interests, vying for access to the same patch of seabed.

On top of that there’s the prospect of carbon capture storage, in which the oil business can expect be paid subsidies to dispose of the harmful by-products of the stuff it sells us to start with.

The problem is, the prime site for disposal of all this stuff to be pumped deep into the ground is going to be?

You guessed it, it’s going to call for a lot of seabed when the time comes.

To put things in blunt terms, it begs the question of whether or not the NGOs are

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unknowingly doing someone else’s dirty work by clearing out those pesky fishermen?

Suppose the whole basis of everything you had worked for were to be pulled from under your feet.

The thought that your beliefs could become suddenly groundless is a chilling one.

Yet this is the possibility that the green organisations could have to face up to; not the executives and the strategic directors at the top of the tree who presumably have an idea of what may be going on, but the ordinary people who work for these

organisations, the volunteers who stand on street corners wearing whale costumes and shaking the tin, and the millions of people who send a few dollars or euros every month to what they sincerely believe is a good and worthy cause.

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the possibility is that these people are unwitting victims of a carefully calculated and very successful strategy, a con trick on a colossal scale.

Just like the fishermen who are being shoved aside, these are the people who could have every right to feel abused and misused if this should be shown to be the case.

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EDITORIAL

Publisher Pal Korneliussen pal.korneliussen@intrafish.com Editorial Director Drew Cherry drew.cherry@intrafish.com Executive Editor John Fiorillo john.fiorillo@intrafish.com Fishing Publications Editor Cormac Burke cormac.burke@intrafish.com Technical Editor Quentin Bates fnifeatures@gmail.com Associate Editor Rijuta Dey rijuta.dey@intrafish.com Production Laura Champion laura.champion@intrafish.com Graphic Designer Iain Brady

SALES

Commercial Director Thomas Bakke thomas.bakke@intrafish.com Advertising Sales Manager Unn Eilen Vik + 47 977 01 451 u_vik@nhst.as Subscription Sales Manager Cuan Joannides +44 207 029 5707 cuan.joannides@intrafish.com ISSN 0015-3044 Printed by Mortons Print Ltd, Lincolnshire LN9 6JR, UK

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May 2014

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COVER STORY

Fishing on the defensive

Quentin Bates

Fishing certainly has some heavy artillery lined up against it.

There is hardly a whisper of criticism anywhere in the media levelled against other marine users, such as the dredging industry that takes millions of cubic metres of habitat from vulnerable inshore zones or emerging industries that are increasingly interested on the deep sea

T

he North Sea’s Dogger Bank, a fishing area for as long as there has been fishing, now apparently needs to be protected from the effects of damaging fishing gears.

Yet dotting the seabed with steel structures driven a hundred feet into the seabed, seems to be acceptable. The North Sea today is strewn with windfarms, and fishing grounds are being steadily lost. It is increasingly noticeable that once other interests require access to the seabed, fishing is shunted aside, such as in areas where exploratory drilling for oil and gas is apparently acceptable, while those same areas remain closed to fishing to

protect supposedly vulnerable fish stocks.

The mainstream media maintains its strong anti-fishing emphasis, not least as a group of journalists close to the NGOs tends to dominate any environmental debate. Material from NGOs is reproduced largely verbatim with no effort made to seek out opposing viewpoints that could contradict the green viewpoint or even expose it as being over-simplistic.

European and US media routinely carry this very onesided coverage of anything that relates to the marine environment, while in the UK every broadsheet newspaper is guilty of much the same bias. Even British satirical magazine Private Eye, renowned for aiming its barbs

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3litre

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Feature

May 2014

$75

NGO allegation of beam trawlers burning 3 litre of fuel for every kilo fish caught; though the data is from 1980s

$75 million spent by eNGOs in lobbying in Europe alone, according to a study

by French NGO P&D

Demo: The fishing industry has been ill-equipped to respond to the tactics that the Green lobby has used so skilfully, moving on from shock tactics to hard-headed lobbying, and the anticipated next strategy is the legal route to ask yourself if this has taken place organically, if that word can be used in this context, or if it has all been orchestrated. at those guilty of corporate and government bullshit, appears to accept the NGOs’ claims without question.

The issue as whole is convoluted. Lobbyists are hard at work behind the scenes to push for their clients’ interests. There are odd alliances of green groups and industry sectors that aren’t exactly known for their green credentials. What is disturbingly clear is that money talks and the green groups have the ear of the media and the public, while the fishing business has neither a great deal of money behind it nor access to a sympathetic media anywhere.

There are few fighting fishing’s corner and the spectacle earlier this year of an NGO mobilising public opinion with

extraordinary effectiveness to achieve the closure of a particular set of fishing grounds, in practical terms overturning the decision that the European Parliament had taken based on scientific recommendations, is sinister in its implications.

The sheer pressure being levelled against the fishing business and some homework into where the money comes from snaps things in to focus. To rewind only a generation or two ago, fishermen were heroes.

These were people who it was recognised worked hard in difficult conditions to produce food.

In the space of a few years the image of the fishing industry has been comprehensively turned upside down in a process that has been so effective that you have

Follow the money – if you can A report prepared in 2012 by French NGO Pêche et Développement (P&D) looked into the backing a great many of the NGOs opposing fishing receive and concluded that some very significant amounts of money are being routed towards a swathe of organisations with very clear anti-fishing stances, with five wealthy charitable foundations very much in the forefront.

There are a great many charitable foundations in existence, some with a single focused agenda, others with a range of causes to support, just as there are thousands of NGOs ranging from the single-issue organisations to environmental titans such as Greenpeace and WWF. Just as a relatively narrow group of NGOs take a direct interest in fishing,

five charitable trusts in particular concern themselves with fisheries issues; the Pew Charitable Trusts, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Oak Foundation.

Between them they are estimated to have channelled $75 million into lobbying in Europe alone, not least in the couple of years immediately preceding the Common Fisheries Policy reforms, with various Pew organisations so prominent in this as to give the impression that a wholesale grab was being made for policy on commercial fisheries.

According to P&D’s figures, on top of the cash spent on lobbying, a further $90m went into marine science, plus the $57m into a sustainable seafood scheme and an additional $230m estimated to have been invested in influencing the reform of the US fisheries act.

The big player is PEW, which

has taken a definite lead in marine issues, not only fishing, and there are differences to the ways the trusts operate. Most prefer to effectively donate resources, but PEW operates more subtly.

In many instances, PEW does not pump vast amounts into its organisations. The Bloom Association in France, which spearheaded the deep water campaign, has made much of the fact that is does not receive a lot of PEW money, but instead the association with PEW provides kudos. The association with Pew provides influence, reputations and careers – as well as cash.

The wealth behind the Moore and Packard foundations has its origins in the computer industry (Intel and Hewlett Packard), while the Walton Foundation’s wealth comes from Walmart and the Oak Foundation’s cash came from a duty-free shopping empire, while the founders of PEW are the heirs of the Sun Oil company’s founders.

16 The link to the oil business has since faded, and the Pew Charitable Trust now sits on a pile of money that is estimated to yield something between $200 and $300m annually, of which $100m is spent on charitable activities around the city of Philadelphia.

The rest goes on a variety of causes, of which marine issues consume a large portion, although exactly how much isn’t clear.

PEW has a long list of activities, of which ocean issues are just one.

PEW also has its own Research Centre, a highly respected one, as well as its activities in health research and bio-medical genetics and fields such as monitoring public policy efficiency and economics – but it seems that ocean issues are increasingly the main focus as PEW seeks to influence ocean politics on every front on a geo-strategic scale.

Minerals are also a clear area of interest, hence the interest in Pitcairn and Easter Island marine protected areas, as well as the strategically important Chagos and Palau regions. The PEW stance is also confusing; not least as it supports campaigns against both mineral and oil exploration in some areas.

The PEW tax-free (thanks to the charitable status) billions work hard to provide revenue for the trust, invested in businesses all over the world via a heavyweight stock market player.

Environmental credentials could be judged to come adrift at this point, as PEW’s investments are spread very widely, nowhere accounting for overwhelming shareholdings of enterprises, and there’s no apparent aversion to investing in some top-rank polluters.

The PEW strategy is generally to keep out of the limelight. It prefers to establish organisations and then to take a step back into the background, such as with the Global Ocean Commission that PEW established and supports.

PEW also established SeaWeb, which was closely involved with the Magnuson Act reform in the US, energetically pushing for the introduction of tradable quotas and regionalisation of management in a process that finally placed management of fisheries at local levels in the hands of NGOs. A similar process appears to be taking place in Europe as both PEW and Oak were initially squarely behind the ideal that quotas should be tradable with a price tag attached to them, although this position has softened.

The unique factor about ocean resources is that these are commons – owned effectively by everyone. The Tragedy of the Commons theory that has been around for years suggests that a commonly-owned resource can never be managed in a responsible manner without over-exploitation.

The underlying message in support of tradable quotas, effectively market forces and ownership in private hands of marine resources as opposed to common ownership or state stewardship, sounds distinctly like good ol’ neo-con principles being promulgated.

In fact, PEW and the other wealthy trusts behave very subtly,

Feature

May 2014

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Scrapped: Fishing in Europe and North America has been under some severe pressure as governments have been lobbied hard by green organisations to slash commercial fishing. Does each wheelhouse from a scrapped boat represent a dozen lost livelihoods or a lobbying success story?

promoting public-private partnerships and deftly using these to influence the decision-making process, combining this with skilful manipulation of the media in a manner that the diverse and fragmented fishing industry has not been not in any position to respond to.

Of course, PEW has every right to do this. Most of us live in democratic societies and PEW operates from the US, one of those states that has yet to ratify UNCLOS and which is therefore, ironically, not able to raise high seas issues at an international level in the same way as other states.

Incidentally, the US decision not to ratify UNCLOS is largely due to its objections to Part XI of the treaty referring to access to the deep seabed and extraction of potentially highly valuable minerals.

It would be very easy – too easy – to point the finger at PEW’s oil industry origins and suppose that it operates on behalf of the oil industry to clear the seabed of inconvenient potential competition as oil exploitation moves deeper and the space is also required for the emerging and as yet untried carbon capture storage.

But it would be impossible to define this without having an idea of the interests of the PEW board members, and that information isn’t available.

On the other hand, the longstanding media campaign to demonise the fishing business goes back a many years and some who feel that the start date coincides with the outcry exactly 25 years ago following the Exxon Valdez incident in Prince William

Sound. At that time the oil industry’s environmental image was poor – and since then this has been switched around entirely.

The oil business now comes in for relatively little sustained criticism, even when a major incident takes place. Fishing is very much the villain in the eyes of the media and the general public, and the activities of myriad groups, most funded to some extent by trusts, has been key to this.

The question is, for whom is PEW operating? Is this pure philanthropy, however misguided some of us may feel it may be? Or are there other interests at stake here? The sheer volumes of cash involved would indicate to the ordinary fisherman on the deck that this has to be more than straightforward environmental philanthropy and the underlying indications are that the aim is to place control of the oceans in the hands of a small group. It seems to be working, as NGOs are now frequently the primary point of contact regulatory authorities, rather than existing management bodies.

PEW and the other trusts have invested very heavily in international bodies and places itself to manipulate public opinion, making itself a an organisation powerful enough able to influence states – possibly to the extent of being able to subjugate national sovereignty?

Every few years the US government’s National Intelligence Council prepares and publishes its future trends reports and proposes potential future scenarios for the state of the world to come. The 2012 edition puts forward several predictions for

what the world we live in will look like in 2030 – and possibly the most unsettling of these is the non-state world, in which the nation state does not disappear, but much of the world’s affairs become run by NGOs, businesses, academic institutions and wealthy individuals.

This may sound like conspiracy theory, but this is at least intelligent conspiracy theory projected by people with in-depth knowledge of their subjects – and considering the influence that the charitable trusts wield, maybe not that far-fetched.

Fighting fishing’s corner Bluefish has its origins among the hard-pressed fishing companies of Lorient and Boulogne, the heartland of France’s deep water fishing fleets that have shrunk to less than half the size they were a decade ago. This is a new organisation has been established with the aim of protecting the environment, but also of developing the fishing industry.

Spanish operators also quickly became involved and interest has been growing, with a Scottish presence also on board. Now Bluefish is cautiously looking to expand, primarily as a lobbying vehicle to counterbalance the green juggernaut, effectively an NGO with fishing industry backing. Nicolas Teisseire has been appointed as its first director and he told Fishing News International that Bluefish was established in April last year, and has already been active, using a professional communications company to get its message across.

“We have kept it low-key to

start with. Bluefish is a non-profit organisation and at present we are establishing ourselves,” he said, adding that Bluefish has a northeast Atlantic focus, although there are issues worldwide that merit serious attention.

“We certainly can’t say that all stocks are in danger in the north-east Atlantic,” he said, commenting that the abundance of hake and cod, plus the super-abundance of mackerel, demonstrate that the green stance on many fisheries is often seriously at variance with reality.

“We see in a lot of instances across Europe with communities trying to rebuild the fishing activity they had shifted away from.

Many local authorities focused their development on travel, but now their economies are struggling they are asking where all the tourists are.”

“We also want to get the word out that ICES and organisations at a national level such as Ifremer in France are firmly in favour of developing fishing, and have recommended increased quotas,” BlueFish president Olivier le Nezet said, commenting that the deep water debacle in Brussels is a case in point.

ICES and Ifremer both recommended that quotas should be increased on deep water species, based on the science, landing figures and a number of other parameters. In spite of the viewpoints put forward by non-political, scientific bodies, the green lobby mobilised an extremely cleverly run internet campaign to lobby for the deep water fishery to be closed. The result was a cascade of public opinion and fishing company

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May 2014

Feature

Portrayal: ‘Fishermen are represented as vandals and liars’ Scapêche was forced to do a deal that has pushed its activities out of anything deeper than 800m.

“The tactics are subtle. One way this is done is by publishing information, such as the assertion by one NGO that trawlers burn three litres of fuel per kilo of fish caught, along with a footnote stating that these figures date back to the 1980s and refer to beam trawlers. The next step is to quote these figures again somewhere else, but this time losing the reference, and then the figures are out there. From that you can take the unreliable FAO figures on the size for the world’s fisheries and extrapolate an entirely inaccurate set of figures on that basis.”

“We are also seeing the biodiversity argument being used to prevent fishermen from entering various areas because of this or that species and some voices are saying very loudly that fishing activity is destroying the marine environment. Arguments have been taken to a largely emotional level. Fishermen are represented as vandals and liars, while the NGOs strive to highlight non-existent links between science and the fishing industry,” he commented and added that issues such as windfarm growth are also of interest, not least as there are significant differences from country to country on how legislation is implemented.

“We see in Scotland there is a very strong pressure on fishing from the energy sector, which we don’t yet see so much in France.

But we need to monitor this so we can provide feedback on working practices for our members. Our focus is firmly on sustainable

fisheries – but we don’t share the same ideas as the other NGOs about how this should be achieved and our policy is also to stress the social and economic aspects that also have to be taken into account when discussing policies that affect people’s livelihoods.”

He added that Bluefish needs to build up an audience in much the same way that the green NGOs have done, and while the traditional tools are not as effective as they once were, social media have become far more important and this is where much of the focus needs to be placed.

On the other hand, the green NGOs have already moved forward another step and it seems clear that aggressively pursuing the legal route is a coming strategy. Arguably not before time, BlueFish is establishing itself on Rue Montroyer, the street in Brussels where virtually every NGO has a presence close to the heart of European government.

“We expect to have access to the same European funds that the green NGOs have been getting from the EU for years to lobby the EU for their causes,” Nicolas Teisseire said.

“We have a great deal to do to compensate for the huge weight of unbalanced and often illinformed debate that is taking place. We see the same frustrations everywhere with the way the NGOs portray fishermen.

“The NGOs’ tactics are all roughly similar and we have to use the same tools as they use.

The challenges are that the active NGOs represent overwhelmingly city dwellers, not people from coastal communities.”

8 panels midwater trawl

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