Minister’s “heartbreak” over cod - and over bass, too

The fisheries minister (Jonathan Shaw) today described on BBC Breakfast as
"heartbreaking" that EU rules were forcing fishermen catching cod in the North
Sea to throw them back dead.

Richard Ferré, chairman of the National Federation of Sea Anglers, said today
that a month ago Mr. Shaw himself in a scarcely publicised move, committed an
equally heartbreaking act telling fishermen that they were free to go on
slaughtering in the sea and then selling, huge numbers of small "plate size"
immature bass.

"It is ironic that at the first sign that cod stocks may be recovering the
first thing the minister wants to do is to take more fish out of the sea,” he
said.

“The same philosophy no doubt guided his decision to allow the bass slaughter
to continue. In the longer term such actions threaten fish stocks and the
livelihoods of commercial fishermen and the 19,000 people employed in the sea
angling industry."

The bass fishermen are now allowed to kill are only 36cm (14 inches) long and
not big enough to spawn.

"He completely reversed a decision by his predecessor (Ben Bradshaw) who
after months of deliberation had agreed to protect baby bass from overfishing and
raise the landing size to 40cm (nearly 16 inches), " said Mr. Ferré. "It was
part of a plan to raise the size to 45cm (nearly 18 inches) by 2010 by which
time the fish caught would all have spawned."

It was to have been part of a programme to regenerate bass stocks, allowing
them to grow much bigger and develop valuable fisheries for both commercial
fishermen and sea anglers. The recreational sea angling industry is worth £1
billion a year and there are a million sea anglers.

But Mr. Shaw said he could not back the measure because the brunt would have
been borne by the inshore fishing fleet '"given its current pressures and the
present healthy state of the stock.”

His short sighted action has been condemned by the government’s own
parliamentary spokesman on angling (Martin Salter MP) who said he had seen nothing to
suggest, as the minister did, that raising the size limit would have a “
significant impact” on commercial fishermen. Mr. Salter added that the survival of
any species was dependent on its ability to breed at least once.