Summary

I wrote this in preparation for participation in the Seafood Matters podcast where I was interviewed by Jim Cowie.

The fishing industry has been subject to a barrage of simplistic propaganda over the last few years.  The non-scientific narrative funded by opinion holders has the potential to impact on governmental policy and stakeholders.  The narrow-minded obsession with MPAs as “the solution” to ecological management has the potential to do more harm than good.  Environmental NGOs and media stars with an interest in supporting sustainability need to talk to stakeholders to get balanced views.

Article

I have been troubled by the recent concerted and ideological campaign against the fishing industry in the UK by NGOs, often well funded by overseas foundations that were often set up by oily oligarchs (MarInnLeg, 2025).  In the UK what we are seeing is a fundamental industry being impacted by the cold dead hands of American philanthropists.  First Seaspiracy and then more recently the film Ocean have served as adverts for this ideological, anti-science and anti-fishing campaign.  They have been enough to scare politicians into considering blanket bans on fishing that will potentially damage an industry and vulnerable coastal communities.  The call for several months now has been to ban all trawling in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).  This is despite the fact that MPAs have been through a consultative process involving NGOs, government and the fishing industry, are designated to protect specific features and the regulations for each one are appropriate to eliminate impact on those features.  Where the MPA is designated to protect something like slow-growing maerl beds (which serve as nursery grounds for scallops), banning bottom trawling makes sense.  Where the designation is to protect cetaceans, banning bottom trawling, that has pretty much zero interaction with cetaceans, makes absolutely no sense at all.  It is purely a vindictive attempt to target the fishing industry.

The attempts by well-funded organisations to exclude commoners from the sea that they have used to gather food for hundreds of years resembles the clearances.  The power imbalance is the same now at sea as it was historically on land.  In the past the commoner on land had no lawyers or pieces of paper to help them retain their rights.  Until recently, no one organisation (aside from the crown) could own areas of the sea inside the UK EEZ.  A fisherman’s string of pots had the same legal right to occupy an area as a jack-up barge or a windfarm.  Now windfarms take up increasing swathes of the sea and represent de facto ownership of areas of seabed.  The historic concept of freedom of the seas appears to have vanished.  We’ve seen the development of spatial management that controls when, where and what fishermen can catch, including management supported by fishermen such as real time closures (Needle and Catarino, 2011; Woods et al., 2018).  This is an effective management measure which means that when a fisherman catches too many fish of the wrong sort or size s/he reports it, and an area is closed for a while.  Now we are seeing the development of permanent marine enclosures, the deliberate exclusion of traditional users of the commons from their resources – not backed by science but by fanatical ideology.  This is a holy war by the lobbying industry against the fishing industry.  I have seen someone from Oceana present a slide at a conference that suggested respected fisheries scientists and industry representatives are “the enemy” (MBA conference, Hull University, 2025).

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from the common,

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from the goose

(17^th Century song lyric)

MPAs are attractive as a silver bullet to people who are ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the complexity of marine ecosystems.  Fish numbers increase inside areas where fishing is prevented but MPAs do nothing to reduce fishing effort (Hilborn, 2018).  In fact they increase fishing effort.  Fishing patterns are not random and have often been established over many, many years.  Fishermen target areas where there are fish.  These are often the same areas that are targeted for “protection”.  When they can no longer fish in areas where fish are abundant they have to target areas where abundance is less.  This means that they have to fish harder and cover more area and use more fuel or gear to catch fewer fish.  For example, recent work has demonstrated that spatial restrictions have doubled the carbon footprint of Norway’s mackerel fishing fleet (Scherrer et al., 2024).These naive views of the marine environment are often amplified by the voices of celebrities who have little knowledge of the complexities of marine ecology and fisheries science but, are instinctively attracted to simplistic and what appear to be blindingly obvious solutions.

For every complex problem there is a solution that is obvious, straightforward and completely wrong (Unknown)

Where large scale MPAs have been designated they have often failed to achieve any change in commercial fish numbers (Hampton et al., 2023).  This can be because the design of protected areas is influenced as much by politics as ecology (Caveen et al., 2014; Dunne et al., 2014; Caveen et al, 2015).  In addition politicians facing a barrage of slick marketing from NGOs are more likely to seek a rapid “one step” solution than engage with the complex and nuanced processes that ensure legitimate, just and sustainable transitions.

What is particularly annoying is the fact that despite the desire of some to draw pretty but often pointless boxes on charts there are actually many and varied effective methods to manage fisheries – to manage how much they catch and how they interact with the environment.  Fishermen want to save money so the trawls that they have developed in recent years in partnership with governmental and non-governmental scientists are much lighter than they were years ago and take much less bycatch – certainly nothing like the 80% figure that has been bandied about recently.  These lighter trawls skim over the surface of the seabed and require much less fuel.  Static gear nets such as drift nets once used to occasionally capture cetaceans and seals.  Legitimate fishermen don’t want to catch these animals so they started attaching pingers to the nets to scare them away.  With the global growth in the number of lobster/crab pots, possibly related to the demise of trawling, there has been a rise in some areas in the occasional cetacean entangled in the buoy lines.  Fishermen have responded to this phenomenon by working with scientists and developing ropeless fishing gear that only deploys the buoy line when the fisherman comes to collect it (Myers et al., 2019).

The ongoing dependence of the conservation industry on, or misuse of, poor science to buttress their desire to expunge the fishing industry is not new.  Many of the academic papers that have made  international headlines that suggest the fishing industry is destroying the ocean have later turned out to be untrue.  These include the assertion that all fish will be gone from the oceans by 2048 and we will have to eat jellyfish, the suggestion that trawling releases as much CO2 into the atmosphere as the aviation industry, that there are only 100 cod left in the north sea, that all large fish species have been pushed towards extinction or that fishing covers 55% of the ocean.  All have been later found to be based on really misleading analysis and are often published by scientists who have received funding from foundations that have an anti fishing agenda (Cochrane et al., 2024).  I am not aware of any core fisheries science papers that have set out to mislead the public or ended up on the Retractionwatch.com database.

Many in the conservation industry want to see little chocolate box boats skippered by Captain Birdseye types in quaint towns as the only survivors in the fishing industry.  These boats are the shop window for the fishing industry, tourists in coastal towns always gravitate to the harbour to enjoy the spectacle of fishing boats bustling around the harbour or landing their catch.  However they do not represent all of the fishing profession and are in some ways the most problematic to manage. From a carbon and management perspective the large so-called industrial fisheries that efficiently target huge shoals of pelagic fish such as mackerel are much better than small scale fishers. The fish that industrial trawlers (the combine harvesters of the sea) catch is some of the most carbon friendly foodstuff we harvest (Parker and Tyedmers, 2014).  Where small scale fishers win is in the fact that one fisherman at sea supports 7-14 people ashore, something that is completely critical for economically challenged coastal communities.

The attractiveness of fishing villages, such an important part of our culture, is such that coastal towns are being hollowed out as the price of houses in them goes far beyond what a small scale fisherman can afford (Thompson et al., 2016).  The well-heeled folk who can afford to retire to quaint coastal villages or own 2^nd homes, that remain empty for months at a time, have a different set of values than the industrious folk who built these communities.  The new inhabitants value the aesthetics of the environment in which they live but have no deep economic ties to it.  They see their values as being superior to those of the “natives” who once populated these places year round and depended on what they could get from the sea to make a living.  Many areas dominated by fishing cultures are now go-to destinations for the cruise industry.  This industry burns unbelievable amounts of carbon and is turning the high streets in their target communities into Hollywood-esque facades of what they once were.  Because the cruise industry relies on large-scale corporate supply chains they don’t even buy their supplies from the communities they visit.  Their clients are shepherded ashore in packs to panic buy tat (probably manufactured in China) from touristic shops.

The holier than thou, or even racist, undertones of the conservation movement have deep roots.  The establishment of the national parks in the USA was driven by white men who viewed the indigenous populations who lived there as subhuman, filth on the face of the beautiful landscape they wanted to remain pristine, untroubled by human activity.  Our modern views of wilderness and what developing nations should look like from a global north perspective are driven by a skewed view of Africa seen by the white men who “discovered” it (Adams and McShane, 1997).  They encountered a land that had recently been ravaged by disease and war, where humanity had receded for a while.  What the white explorers saw was a ravaged landscape.  Following discovery of the continent its people were enslaved and viewed as property.  Peoples who provided slaves to work on plantations owned by northern Europeans could not possibly have the wherewithal to manage their own environments.  They needed a paternal empire to step in and give them civilization. 

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” 

What we have seen historically on African, South American and Asian continents was driven by the same mindset that is driving current marine conservation.  Apparently fishing communities cannot possibly look after their own resources, its like letting the fox into the hen house. They apparently need people from outwith their communities to tell them how to manage the resources they have been harvesting for centuries.  There is little difference between the great white saviour in Africa or the American upper classes of the early 20^th century and the entitled opinion-holders who currently seek to exclude stakeholders, who have a real and daily connection with the environment, from making a living.  Their skewed view of how the world should be is driving indigenous and semi-indigenous peoples from their traditional terrestrial and marine resources to the periphery of a modern society.  In the global south, commoners are stripped from their complex and intrinsically linked ecological and social networks to end up in poverty or serving white folks in seasonal tourist jobs or the service sector (Dowie, 2011).  In South Africa some MPAs have been unilaterally declared and what were thriving fishing villages have nice holiday homes for cape towners on the seaward side of the road and shanty towns on the landward side, full of people who used to be proud fishermen.  We see the same patterns in the global north, quaint fishing towns such as Anstruther, Staithes and Crinan have lost their reason to exist beyond being escapes from reality for wealthy city folk.

By allowing an unscientific narrative to dominate the conservation agenda in the Global North we encourage “conservation leakage”, the displacement of fishing effort to parts of the world where fisheries management is less effective.  The EU currently imports 70% of the fish it consumes (EUMOFA, 2023).  This is unsustainable and threatens the livelihoods of people in the global south who depend on local coastal, often low trophic level small pelagic species.  With climate change it is predicted that while there will be 30-70% increases in potential catch in high latitudes, there will be decreases in the tropics by 2055 (Cheung et al., 2010).  Thus socioeconomically vulnerable people will have to compete with the financial might of the global north to access their own fish that are diminishing because of the carbon heavy historical activities of the rich.

Celebrities and NGOs talk about the importance of co-management.  What they actually mean is taking the rights to make a living off commoners and giving them to corporations and populist environmentalists (Hunt and Hilborn, 2025).  The power to manage fisheries needs to be given back to the people who have an economic and social stake in their health.  Not in such a way as to make them have to constantly battle against administrators who are often relying on data that is 2 years out of date.  We need to take a deep breath, listen to the science – people like Ostrom who found that there are basic rules that make for effective commons management.  She found that although there are 7-8 general rules, every commons management system evolves organically to fit its particular context and they are very varied in their detail (Ostrom, 1990). 

Being an actor, presenter or celebrity chef and having the wealth and leisure to discus fantastical fisheries management schemes over canapes while sipping organic lime juice doesn’t mean you have any sort of understanding of the marine environment and what makes a successful and sustainable fishery.  If only these folk would accept the open invites they have had from the fishing industry they might spout less of the poison they receive from the conservation industry and present a more balanced view.

References cited.

Adams, J. S., and McShane, T. O. 1997. The Myth of Wild Africa. University of California Press, Berkerley.

Caveen, A. J., Clare Fitzsimmons, M. P., Dunn, E., Sweeting, C. J., Johnson, M. L., Bloomfield, H., Jones, E. V., et al. 2014. Diverging Strategies to Planning an Ecologically Coherent Network of MPAs in the North Sea: The Roles of Advocacy, Evidence, and Pragmatism in the Face of Uncertainty. Advances in marine biology, 69.

Caveen, A., Polounin, N., Gray, T., Stead, S.M. 2015. Controversy over MPAs- Science meets Policy. Springer.

Cheung, W., Lam, V., Sarmiento, J. L., Kearney, K., Watson, R., Zeller, D., and Pauly, D. 2010. Large-scale redistribution of maximum fisheries catch potential in the global ocean under climate change. Global change biology, 16: 24–35.

Cochrane, K. L., Butterworth, D. S., Hilborn, R., Parma, A. M., Plagányi, É. E., and Sissenwine, M. P. 2024. Errors and bias in marine conservation and fisheries literature: Their impact on policies and perceptions. Marine policy, 168: 106329. Elsevier BV.

Dowie, M. 2011. Conservation Refugees. MIT Press, London.

Dunne, R. P., Polunin, N. V. C., Sand, P. H., and Johnson, M. L. 2014. The creation of the Chagos marine protected area: a fisheries perspective(☆). Advances in marine biology, 69: 79–127.

EUMOFA. 2023. The EU market overview. https://eumofa.eu/the-eu-market (Accessed 18 June 2025).

Hampton, J., Lehodey, P., Senina, I., Nicol, S., Scutt Phillips, J., and Tiamere, K. 2023. Limited conservation efficacy of large-scale marine protected areas for Pacific skipjack and bigeye tunas. Frontiers in marine science, 9. Frontiers Media SA. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.1060943.

Hilborn, R. 2018. Are MPAs effective? ICES journal of marine science: journal du conseil, 75: 1160–1162. Oxford University Press.

Hunt, A., and Hilborn, R. 2025. Seychelles’ blue finance: A blueprint for marine conservation? Marine policy, 179: 106717. Elsevier BV.

MarInnLeg. 2025. Diagnostico de Grupos de Internes Azules. Fundacion – Centro de Innovacion de Estudios Juridicos Maritimos Y Pesqueros. 172 pp. https://marinnleg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/INFORME-GIs_2025-1.pdf.

Myers, H. J., Moore, M. J., Baumgartner, M. F., Brillant, S. W., Katona, S. K., Knowlton, A. R., Morissette, L., et al. 2019. Ropeless fishing to prevent large whale entanglements: Ropeless Consortium report. Marine policy, 107: 103587. Elsevier BV.

Needle, C., and Catarino, R. 2011. Evaluating the effect of real-time closures on cod targeting. Ices Journal of Marine Science, 68: 1647–1655. academic.oup.com.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Parker, R. W. R., and Tyedmers, P. H. 2014. Fuel consumption of global fishing fleets: current understanding and knowledge gaps. Fish and fisheries : 1–13.

Scherrer, K. J. N., Langbehn, T. J., Ljungström, G., Enberg, K., Hornborg, S., Dingsør, G., and Jørgensen, C. 2024. Spatial restrictions inadvertently doubled the carbon footprint of Norway’s mackerel fishing fleet. Marine Policy, 161: 106014.

Thompson, C., Johnson, T., and Hanes, S. 2016. Vulnerability of fishing communities undergoing gentrification. Journal of rural studies, 45: 165–174.

Woods, P. J., Þór Elvarsson, B., Sigurdsson, T., and Stefánsson, G. 2018. Evaluating the effectiveness of real-time closures for reducing susceptibility of small fish to capture. ICES journal of marine science: journal du conseil, 75: 298–308. Oxford University Press (OUP).