Ban "hoover" fleets to save cod stocks, says Gummer
By Charles Clover, Environment Editor
JOHN GUMMER, the Environment Secretary, called for a ban yesterday on industrial fishing by "hoover" fleets in the North Sea after scientists found that catching sand eels, tiny fish at the base of the marine food chain, is helping to wipe out the cod and haddock.
Mr Gummer said: "We need to increase the number of fish that can be caught for human consumption and that means stopping the damage that is done in taking the food on which the fish depend."
His call for a ban goes far beyond recent calls by Tony Baldry, the fisheries minister, for precautionary quotas to be applied to industrial fish catches.
The report by scientists from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and Warwick University, found that sand eels and Norway pout made up 60 per cent of the diet of cod, haddock and whiting.
They found that there had been a significant 30 per cent drop in the amount of sand eels and pout consumed by cod, haddock and whiting in the past decade, almost certainly due to the targeting of "industrial" fish. As a result of being starved of sand eels and pout, fish such as cod and haddock were likely to be forced to look for other sources of food - such as each other.
They were using more energy looking for food and less on breeding.
The scientists therefore called for a "substantial" reduction in industrial fishing.
The report made other major criticisms of the science which underlines the Common Fisheries Policy. First, it said that in some areas of the North Sea 60 to 70 per cent of fish caught were landed illegally and that overall the figure was 30 per cent.
The impact of unreported illegal fishing on a massive scale was having a bigger effect on the cod and haddock than overfishing and was also dangerously skewing the official science behind catch quotas for those fish. The report also challenges for the first time the assertion by scientists in Denmark, which is overwhelmingly responsible for the industrial fishery, that the North Sea produces a total of six million tons of sand eels and pout every year, of which only one million tons is caught.
Scientists believe that "hoover" fleets could be catching nearly as many sand eels as are born every year, placing the stock in danger of collapse.
They say there is evidence that the sand eel population has already been wiped out on the Dogger Bank, once one of the richest fisheries for cod and haddock in the world, and that it could be wiped out on the Wee Bankie, off the Firth of Forth, in a few years.
One of their strongest recommendations is that EU scientists should undertake a proper analysis of the total sand eel stock in the North Sea as none currently exists.
The report received cross-party support in the Commons, where it was launched yesterday, with Labour's fishery spokesman, Elliot Morley, calling for a ban on industrial fishing.
