Hansard

The EU fisheries talks next week may not agree much. The continuing failure of international discussions involving the EU, Norway, the Faroes and Iceland will mean that agreement on stocks caught and fished in EU waters will not happen until January—if the industry is lucky. The cabinet secretary was good enough to illustrate that point earlier. I and the fishing industry are very concerned that the industry will have no fish to catch well into 2014 because it suits some countries to have no agreement. That is where we are this year, which is very different from previous years.

Iceland and the Faroes have no interest in being helpful to our fishermen. The EU sanctions in place over their illegal fishing of pelagic stocks are hurting. Those countries can block agreement on the mainstays of the Scottish fleet, which are cod, haddock and whiting. That is the current position.

Norway, which makes Machiavelli look a rank amateur when it comes to negotiations, is resisting EU attempts to give the Faroes and Iceland a larger slice of mackerel quota, and quite right too. They may do that, however, on the basis of extracting a better deal for themselves on other fish stocks.

I am sure that the cabinet secretary is clear that if there is no agreement between the EU, Norway, the Faroes and Iceland, it will lead to immense pressure for a deal on mackerel. The EU will argue that agreement must happen to allow the Scottish white-fish fleet—and indeed other fishing fleets—to sea in EU waters. The price of that deal is greater Faroese and Icelandic access to mackerel. That is what the local industry fears—it is certainly what I fear—will happen in 2014. The Faroes and Iceland will be rewarded for illegal fishing.

I hope that the cabinet secretary will confirm that that would be utterly irresponsible and unacceptable. In my view, he should resist that Hobson’s choice. It would be very wrong if our white-fish fleet could catch fish in 2014 only at the expense of cuts in mackerel quota for the Scottish industry. Those two are linked as they have never been linked before.

The most important win that the cabinet secretary can achieve next week in Brussels is, as he said, on effort—the time our fleet can spend at sea. The cod recovery plan is a shambles. Two years ago, the industry was promised by both the Commission and the Government that there would be changes to the plan. However, as fishermen said to me in Lerwick yesterday, nothing about it has changed. The SFF advise that the Commission’s proposals on cutting the time our boats will have at sea in 2014 are unacceptable. As the cabinet secretary rightly said, the Commission hides behind EU law, but that is the law that it and the Government told the industry two years ago would be changed. It has not been changed, so will the cabinet secretary assure the industry that coming from the December fisheries council with anything worse than an effort freeze is simply not an option?

Fishermen have complied with draconian EU rules, some of which are designed here in Edinburgh. Our vessels are allowed to fish for only 90 days in a year. It is possible to achieve more days by jumping through further bureaucratic hoops, but we do not ask any other business in Scotland to restrict its open trading to just 90 days out of 360. Despite sacrifice layered upon sacrifice, there appears to be no let-up in the draconian measures placed upon vessels.

If the cod recovery plan is bad—and it is—fishermen also fear the imposition of a discard ban, not because they do not believe that stopping the dumping of marketable fish is the right thing to do, but because the important thing is getting the plan to work in reality. No one—and I mean no one—has yet explained to the industry how a discard ban will work in practice. It is right to stop dumping. Every fishermen would wish to do that, and the processing industry would wish to stop it as well. However, many Scottish white-fish boats, and certainly the Shetland fleet, depend on a mixed fishery. They catch and have quota for different species. One cannot just catch one species in a net and then haul for a second species. That is not the way a demersal fishery works. So, the devil will truly be in the detail. The industry wants an assurance from the Government that it accepts that the policy must be sensible and possible; otherwise, far from reducing discards, it will increase them. I know that the cabinet secretary is all too well aware of that, but he needs to commit not just to the rhetoric of a discard ban, which we are all very good at, but to ensuring that it works in practice.

There has rarely been a more fraught year than this for the EU fisheries council, not because the prognosis on quotas is bad but because there is a link between what happens in international talks on the pelagic industry and what happens to our white-fish industry like we have never seen before. If there is any sell-out by the EU on rewarding those who are fishing illegally, there will be an outcry, not just in Scotland but right across the EU. Of that there can be no doubt.

I certainly support the cabinet secretary’s motion today. He goes to the talks next week with my support. However, I suspect that the talks between the EU and Norway, the Faroes and Iceland will be far more important in the longer term than what happens in Brussels in a week’s time.

I move amendment S4M-08450.1, to insert at end:

“; notes the importance of the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council in December 2013 agreeing a pragmatic implementation of the EU discard ban on the whitefish fleet; recognises the need for changes to the Cod Recovery Plan, which discriminates against the Scottish industry; supports increases in quota allocations and days-at-sea, and calls for EU international sanctions over mackerel to be given time to deliver the outcomes that the EU has agreed”.

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