A Justification for managing angling or not managing it

“A Justification for managing angling or not managing it”

Something for the Politicians to look at!

A lot appears to have been happening over the last couple of weeks with positive news from Europe or is it? Is it safe to trust a politician? I doubt it

Angling Trust News Release

The European Union would be “crazy” if it tried to control millions of hobby anglers and would not implement “such a ludicrous system” in its plans to update controls on the commercial fishing industry.

But this pledge by Joe Borg, the EU fisheries commissioner, has left Britain’s recreational sea anglers still sceptical.

“We stay on red alert,” Richard Ferré, a director of the Angling Trust, said today.

The row over what is known as “Article 47″ had threatened to engulf Mr. Borg. Last week he moved to calm the row in the European Parliament’s fisheries committee.

British MEPs had warned that every pleasure vessel which ever went fishing, might have to be registered and its catches reported. The proposals, Mr. Borg told them, had been misinterpreted.

“Let me make clear once and for all that the hobby angler who catches a few kilos of fish every time he goes out fishing and uses it for his private consumption, will not be covered by the control regulation…,” Mr. Borg said.

Mr. Ferré, the Angling Trust’s director for sea angling, said that Mr. Borg’s statement was welcome but it depended on the definition of recreational sea angling. “The commissioner had said there were abundant facts and figures showing that certain forms of what he called recreational fishing, had a dangerous and considerable impact on certain vulnerable fish stocks.”

“That is squishy,” he said. “True recreational sea anglers do not sell their catches, they and their families eat them. Their impact on fish stocks is scarcely measurable,” he said.

The fisheries commissioner must, Mr. Ferré added, honour his promise to exclude recreational sea angling from his proposals for new controls for commercial fishing. “The UK’s £1 billion recreational sea angling sport is caught up in this controversy and urgently needs to be disentangled from it.”

The Angling Trust, he said, would continue campaigning with MEPs to ensure UK recreational sea angling would not be swallowed up by what Mr. Borg said would be a “ludicrous system.”

And then we have the Alan Charlton’s interview with Natural England, lots of important questions and lots of political answers with a let out clause in everyone of them.

However I am not going to labour on these issues at this point in time I feel that it is time to look at a few facts most of which I have drawn from the tax payers alliance document entitled;- The Price of Fish by Dr Lee Rotheram.
Within this document lies much of the ammunition that we need to protect our sport and make the government and EU look total fools.

In 2004 the Drew report into the economic impact of sea angling, calculated that 1.1 million households contained at least one member who had been sea angling over the last year in England and Wales The total expenditure on the sport was estimated at £538 million from 12.7million anglers’ days annually.

The total value of the national catch in 2007 was £645 million for 425000 tonnes of fish. If we accept the fact that between 40% and 60% of the fish caught are discarded or dumped, this means that an additional 213000 tonnes of fish has been wasted through the catching process, ie 213000000kgs of fish dumped or 638000000kg of fish captured due to fishing.
If we made the generous assumption that the estimate of 12.7million angling days of 2004 had not significantly changed a lot between 2004 and 2007, and that 1kg of fish was taken for each angling day then the total angling catch would be1.99% of the total weight of fish caught by the commercial sector.
If each angling day represented a catch of 10kg which would be ‘a dream for all anglers’, they would be catching 19% of the total weight of fish caught by the commercial fleet.

The government currently spends around £60million pounds a year managing the commercial sector, a sector that wastes 50% of what it catches through a failed management strategy.

Assuming that the government persists on licensing and policing anglers what will the cost be to the taxpayer? Will it be 2% of £60 million, ie £1.2 million, or 19% of £60 million i.e £11.4 million or maybe more.

With 1.1 million anglers paying a licence fee this cost could be covered but it would leave nothing for all the improvements in angling that we have been promised under the RSA scheme.
How any Government can justify such a proposal when the catches from recreational sea angling are unlikely to be more than 4% by weight of the total number of fish caught by commercial fishing and are between 5% & 12% of what commercial fishermen discard, (remembering of course that these are very generous estimates of what anglers catch) beggars belief.

At a time when the government of the day has put every man woman and child in debt to the tune of £30000 due to their prudent mis-management of the economy one can only question what kind of moral judgement exists in their fruitless desire to destroy one of the few pleasures that are left in our lives.

cheers

Clive

Tags: Clive's Thoughts, eu article 47