Hugh's gone fishing Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall discusses fish

Date Published:

08/11/2007

Hugh on whether fish farms can actually be sustainable

What changes in our seas have you noticed in your lifetime? What concerns you most about the coast close to you?

The waters of the south-west are still a rich source of many fish species, but that means they're also subjected to some of the most damaging of modern fishing techniques: scallop-dredging and beam-trawling spring to mind. Nevertheless, this area also boasts some of the most forward-thinking marine initiatives in the UK. You can buy individually-tagged, hand-line caught sea bass here (linecaught.org.uk), and all kinds of other sustainably-caught fish such as Cornish pilchards, Devon crab and MSC-certified mackerel. Recent projects, including the ground-breaking Invest in Fish South-West collaboration (investinfishsw.org.uk), have pulled fishermen, retailers, consumers and conservationists together to find common solutions to the problems of overfishing and seabed damage. So, all in all, I'm optimistic about my local waters.

What is a healthy and sustainable alternative to a visit to the chip shop?

Well, if your chippie sells battered pollack, witch and dogfish (instead of cod, skate and rock salmon), you don’t need to find an alternative. Since this may still be a little unlikely, though, I'd have to say cooking your own battered fish at home is always a fantastic treat. However, if you’re looking for something healthy and delicious that you can knock up in the same time it would take you to nip out for a parcel of soggy chips, try mackerel fillets, fried in a pan with bay leaves and garlic and eaten with a few slices of buttered brown bread. Tinned fish is great, healthy fast food too: I'm very partial to an omelette filled with sardines and finely sliced red onions.

Do you have an opinion on the farming of fish? Is it the solution to reducing pressure on our overfished wild fish stocks?

Aquaculture ought to offer at least a partial solution to our current marine crisis, but at the moment, it doesn't. This is largely because of the awful side-effects of badly-run, intensively stocked farms. There are many issues that currently mean most fin-fish farming simply isn't sustainable. These include the vast quantities of wild fish that are killed to feed the farmed ones, escaping fish which mingle with local wild populations, the use of powerful chemicals to kill parasites and the degradation of the marine environment due to build-ups of fish excrement.

Nevertheless, fish farming still has great potential and I'm certainly not about to write it off. Some forms of aquaculture are very benign: shellfish farming, for instance, involves little human intervention and in some cases can even benefit the local ecosystem. Freshwater fish farming can also be done in a very environmentally sensitive way. When it comes to sea fish, some pioneers are blazing a trail for more sustainable methods – such as Johnson Seafarms who feed their organic cod on offcuts of herring and mackerel already caught for human consumption. Even the salmon farming industry, guilty of all the crimes I've mentioned above, has begun to clean up its act a bit. This is reflected in the fact that the Soil Association has recently granted organic status to a handful of well run salmon farms.

Are there any conservation issues related to recreational fishing? Or is it just the commercial guys we really have to worry about?

Recreational fishing is basically a smaller-scale version of commercial fishing, so really the same issues are involved. It's true that the most serious threats that face fish species and marine environments come from commercial-scale fishing. However, I'm a firm believer in the cumulative effect of small actions. As a small-scale weekend angler, I strive to avoid catching threatened species. I return under-sized fish to the water and I take only what I and my family can eat. It may sound so obvious, almost facile, to say this but if every fisherman did the same, we wouldn't be in this mess now, would we?

Do we really need the Common Fisheries Policy?

We certainly need a common fisheries policy, but the CFP as we know it now is clearly not working. Getting rid of it altogether isn't the answer: stock levels need to be monitored, limits need to be set, the less responsible fishing nations need to be held to account. However, major changes are required. This complex, lame and contradictory policy is one of the biggest problems facing marine conservation today, and analysing its failures in detail would require me to write a whole new book. But there are a few key points I can make. Firstly, we need to simplify national control of coastal waters – at the moment there is often a clash between local and European legislation that results in some very bizarre and nasty fishing conflicts. Secondly, the politicians who actually set quotas should be obliged to follow the recommendations of the independent scientists who advise them. Currently, lobbying from within the fishing industry has far more influence on the policy-makers and it's not difficult to see how that may not be in the fish's best interests. In fact, this kind of toughening up is really what needs to happen in every area of the CFP. At the moment, it simply doesn't have any teeth. It's weakened and riven by the constant conflict between the interests of member nations: individual states simply have far too much power within it. Rule-making needs to be taken out of the hands of politicians, who are subject to enormous pressure from their own commercial fishermen, and put in the arena of a permanent, independent body - a sort of UN of the seas.

Visit the Marine Conservation Society's website at www.mcsuk.org. Hugh's book 'The River Cottage Fish Book' can be purchased here.