EU Fishing

I don’t know what I expected notorious Spanish fishing barons to look like. Strapping and medallioned, with deep tans and fancy wrist watches? Or sinewy, wiry and sly? In any case, the four defendants (three men and one woman) looked like fairly normal folk, if a little perplexed by the throngs of local and national media wielding cameras and questions outside the Truro Courthouse in Cornwall.

Q: What do you do when you run out of fish?

A: go catch someone else’s!

Cheeky perhaps, but that is the gist of what is referred to in European fishy politics circles as ‘The External Dimension’. Although it sounds like something from sci-fi, this is quite simply European fishing boats catching fish in non-European waters. Earlier this year I joined a Greenpeace ship in West Africa to see the scale of this first hand. It’s a pretty big deal, in every sense.

Basic first aid tells you the most important thing to do is not cause any more harm: don’t make things worse. That makes sense, of course, but if you happen upon someone lying bleeding on the pavement, simply not kicking them on the way past isn’t really a good enough reaction.

I’ve been struggling for analogies to use, ways to try and explain just what is so bad about the recent EU Council ‘agreement’ on fish stocks.