Seaspiracy: George Monbiot and Terri Portmann clash on fishing

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Brussels has long been condemned for its use of fishing super trawlers in the world’s oceans. They are enormous vessels and can be over 300-feet long, often staying at sea for weeks or months catching thousands of tonnes of fish. Their supersized nets – sometimes a mile long – result in bycatch that includes dolphins, porpoises and seals.

The EU was recently accused of operating a “neocolonial” hold over the Indian Ocean after it proposed insufficient measures to tackle overfishing of yellowfin tuna while simultaneously being the largest fisher of the “near threatened” species.

And, according to The Daily Telegraph, EU super trawlers will continue to encroach on UK waters as the Government does not have the powers to implement a blanket ban.

The vessels were a focus point of the new Netflix documentary, ‘Seaspiracy’, that shed light on much of the fishing industry’s shady operations.

This week, climate activist George Monbiot, and Terri Portmann, co-founder of Call for Fish, appeared on Sky News to discuss the impact the UK’s fishing fleets had on the environment in the wake of Seaspiracy.

It was here that Ms Portmann – whose organisation aims to get more people eating British-sourced fish – outlined the ways in which UK fleets had tried to become sustainable despite the questionable practices of their European neighbours.

She said: “George knows well that the majority of the UK fishing fleet are small scale boats – we’re talking smaller than 10 metres in length.

“These are not the type of horror pictures used in the film and nor represent some of the colourful claims that George is making.

“Actually, a lot of these coastal communities are working really hard to be sustainable.

“There’s a project in Lyme Bay which is trialing vessel monitoring and has been for the last ten years, the technology is very difficult to put onto small vessels.

“But this work’s ongoing – your film is 20 years too late, it represents in the UK a system and a process of fishing that was going on many years ago and for 20 years now there has been great advances in selectivity of gear, which is incredibly difficult in a mixed fishery.

“In the south-west we eat our bycatch; now admittedly it’s not shark or turtles, but we should be supporting these small-scale fishermen, supporting the work they’re doing to be more sustainable, to work with scientists, to find better ways of avoiding these things.”

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Before this, however, Mr Monbiot was less than impressed by the efforts made so far, as he said: “It’s absolutely urgent that the small boats in particular are put on a sustainable footing.

“That means every one, all the boats, should be fitted with remote monitoring equipment so that fisheries inspectors can see what’s going all the time, they’re not fishing illegally, they’re not fishing in the wrong places.

“We also need large, properly protected marine reserves where no fishing boats can go in, and we need to protect the small boats from the big boats, from the super trawlers which are taking so much, almost everything.

“The fishing industry is massively concentrated in the hands of a few extremely rich families.

“When we’ve sorted all that out I’d be happy to say to people, ‘Ok, it’s alright to start eating fish again.'”

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Mr Monbiot has previously described the bloc’s impact on the living world as “catastrophic”.

One of the pieces of EU legislation he and other climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, have focused their attention on is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

In a Twitter thread last month, he wrote: “The perverse incentives it creates have destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime habitat.”

Last month, Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said that Brussels had a “neocolonial” relationship with the UK on fishing.

This was, he said, because the EU had exploited UK waters for decades, offering little in return.

He told Express.co.uk: “The EU’s relationship with the UK is neocolonial because it’s exploitative – it’s artificially attached to a trade deal.

“It gives free access to the natural resources of another country for the benefit of the colonial power.

“A trade deal is about trade, and a fishing deal is normally reciprocal, so there’s mutual benefit.

“But, you look at the relationship between the EU and UK on fisheries, it’s not mutual benefit, it’s exploitative, and so the term neocolonial is an accurate description of the relationship between the UK and the EU.”

Express.co.uk has recently launched a campaign to help save Britain’s environment.

We are calling on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to show world leadership on the issue in the run-up to the G7 summit in Cornwall in June and the crunch Cop 26 climate change summit in Glasgow in November.

Along with green entrepreneur Dale Vince we have called on the Government to scrap VAT on green products and to make more space for nature.

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