The miles of paper that have been used in the cataloguing of the monumental failings of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) are scary to comprehend. With 130 million pounds a year, or 60,000 tonnes of dead fish dumped overboard by trawlers, fearful of catching too much fish and exceeding their quota and thus paying a fine, the environmental and logical assault that the CFP introduced is phenomenal.
The common management of fish-stocks removed any sense of belonging and any sense of conservation. It was everybody's resource, so everybody took their share. The CFP was crafted by the EU, even by those with no coast and no historical knowledge of maritime ways. Only the first 12 miles of sea from a nations coast remained under national control; the next 200 miles was given to Brussels.
In distributing the quotas, the traditional Brussels lobbying system of barter and trade-offs took precedence over common sense, with the main concern at EU head-quarters being the construction of an EU fleet to replace national ones.
Those nations that grasped the rules quickly, soon found loop-holes, and gained more quotas than were allowed by registering vessels in different countries. Because quotas are divided up to nations, and then national quotas divided up and shared out amongst each fishing boat, it became possible by registering foreign boats in the UK for other states to gain UK quotas, squeezing out British fishermen.
Those nations, like the UK, that took little care of their maritime heritage, sacrificed fishing jobs and quotas in order to win support on other issues in the horse-trading of European politics. Indeed, the UK could have helped stop the devastation caused by the CFP a long time ago, if it had been willing to stand up for the interests of the citizens of Britain, but instead Westminster seemed content to debate Fisheries Council decisions without having any power to alter them. The 1976 Hague Preferences allows the UK to gain its 200-mile rights again, but Whitehall does not want to jeopardise access to the European bandwagon.
Having destroyed the fish-stocks of the North Sea, the CFP has encouraged fishermen to go and hunt in foreign waters, ignoring the effect on development in those countries. European vessels now plunder African waters, paying the regimes for access to the seas, and putting out of business the local fishermen. David Cameron's protection of the international development budget has little meaning if all it ends up doing is paying unemployed fishermen to sit around whilst the Southern European fishing fleets take their fish.
All of this could continue because Brussels steadfastly refused to accept the failure of the policy, and that it could not manage. The logic of integration and drive to create an EU-fleet for a long time blinded anyone to the reality of what was happening. However, eventually the scientific evidence showed that finite resources are indeed finite. The policy had failed.
Brussels responded by playing up complaints from fishermen about lax enforcement of regulations in different areas (thus giving the message that the Policy and ideology was alright, it was the implementation that was lacking) by outsourcing its centralised control to the Community Fisheries Control Agency (CFCA), a separate legal entity, established in 2005 and based in Spain. The CFCA was charged with coordinating fisheries inspections and enforcing the CFP uniformly across the EU, overseeing the national control agencies in a way that the Commission had failed to do.
Following the European ideal, the Agencies Administrative Board is complete with members from such great maritime nations as Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic, and the latest published financial accounts, from 2008, show that it overspent its budget by over one million Euros, or by well more than a tenth of its annual budget of 8,600,000 Euros.
It's main expenses are staff – 6 million Euros going on Administrative costs, of which over 4 million is directly on staff. The Executive Director, a man with 10 years of experience of enforcing the failed CFP in the Commission, at Grade AD14 earns around 12,000 Euros a month, or 120,000 pounds a year.
To be fair, he seems to be making the right noises. The latest Joint Deployment Plan from the CFCA recognises that the member states must be the cornerstone of fisheries policy, as it is they who have localised knowledge and heritage and in dealing with this issue. As such, there is a recognition that decentralisation is good and costs must be watched carefully. Yet whilst saying this, the Joint Deployment Plan for Blue-Fin Tuna involved member states pooling resources and handing over control to the CFCA, a move towards centralism, instead of the other way round.
Whether any of this in the long term can translate from rhetoric into reality remains to be seen. The CFCA is undoubtedly more competent than the Commission ever was, but whether it will have the necessary freedom from Commission interference and legislative authority to improve things is greatly to be doubted. And of course, the question of why we need a European Agency to govern fish stocks that could be handled nationally in the first place remains unanswered. The duplication that exists between the CFCA and the UK Marine and Fisheries Agency is a tax-payer burden that goes quietly unmentioned. Administration upon administration is the European way, but in a time of crisis, some fiscal relief from supporting another layer of bureaucracy would be welcomed by all Europe's taxpayers.
