Something fishy going on

Why is it that it takes a "celebrity" to tell us something is bad before there's even the ghost of a chance that anything will be done about it?

The European Union regulations about catching and landing fish have been broken for years. In an effort to "protect" species whose populations are either on the verge of crashing, or have already, they limit fishermen to a given number of thousands of tons in a year, after which it is illegal to land any more fish of that kind.

Unfortunately, none of the massed intellect of the EU agricultural and fisheries policy units was capable of realising that there are no nets in existence that can differentiate what they are catching. The nets go down, the fish come up, spill out onto the deck, die, and then - if they are "over quota" - they're thrown back into the sea. Dead.

How is that protecting populations? It isn't. How long has it been going on? Years. What's been done about it? Nothing. Until along comes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, kicking off a campaign very much in the vein of Jamie Oliver and his Turkey Twizzlers, designed to wake everyone up to the problem and do something about it.

Laudable, and I can hardly complain about him or his campaign since he has already - allegedly - secured Tesco's agreement to moving to 100% rod-and-line caught tuna (as opposed to trawled tuna) by the end of 2012. Now, if you were a cynic, you might think "well, yes, that's two years away. Who's going to be monitoring their progress? Who's going to be shouting the odds if they don't quite manage it?" But at least something is happening. Something more than could be achieved by consumers alone.

And that's my beef, really. How is it that something so patently ludicrous, that doesn't achieve the protection it was intended to and at the same time affects the livelihoods of every European fisherman for no benefit whatever, has been allowed to carry on for so long? And why does no-one pay any attention until a bloody TV chef steps in?

In among all the posturing and self-congratulation there are some interesting statistics. 50% of the fish we all eat comes from three species - salmon, tuna & cod. Add haddock and prawns and you're up to 80%. Is it any wonder the populations can't sustain themselves, faced with automated, computerised trawlers pulling hundreds of thousands of tons of them out of the sea every year, and then throwing half of them back dead?

Over a million tons of fish a year are thrown back. Caught, dead, and unable to be landed, sold or eaten. Meanwhile stocks of sardines, herring, and white fish like whiting, hake, coley - that you really would be hard pushed to tell from cod, especially in fish fingers - are plentiful and ignored.

Well, I guess any progress is better than no progress. If you want to sign up to help his campaign (I have), it's at Fish-Fight.net, and the TV programme begins for those in the UK (or those who can watch online) tomorrow night at 9pm on Channel 4.