Good news for Scottish whitefish fleet – new three year EU deal on ‘Scottish model’

After the recent concerns over EU plans to close Scotland‘s west coast fishing grounds, a new three-year deal has been agreed with Europe. This is based on what has become known as ‘the Scottish model’ (although it may owe more than a little to strategies developed earlier in Norway).

Anyway, the model agreed is a two-part strategy. The first is to adopt an approach which takes fewer cod out of the sea but lands more of it into the fish markets. This can be done by increasing the quotas. At the moment, with the quota system, boats are having to dump huge amounts of fish over the side because they don’t have the quotas to land them.

The second part of the strategy will see boats use new nets with much bigger mesh towards the bottom of the net, allowing young cod and other bigger species – which swim deep – to escape being caught. Alongside this, the plan will see the closing of some fishing grounds when cod are spawning.

Together these approaches will produce lower cod mortality. The new Brussels deal is based on a reduction in cod mortality by 25% in 2009 followed by further annual reductions of 10%.

The agreement has been widely welcomed. Bertie Armstrong, CEO of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, says: ‘The old Cod Recovery Plan was broken and we have a new plan now, which for the next three years gives us a much better prospect of success. Everybody saw the results of the old plan, which was fish going over the side. This builds on the work that we have been doing to try to avoid cod, rather than reducing quota and reducing time at sea’.

Richard Lochhead, the Fisheries minister, says that, although the new targets will be challenging, he hopes Scotland will be given a major increase in its cod quota.

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