The UK scallop fishery: Time for a fundamental review

Appleby, Thomas

Abstract

The global fishing industry is facing unprecedented pressures. In the past (for a variety of reasons) the entire ocean was designated as a fishery using any gear type but increasingly this approach is untenable. The seas and the fishery (albeit through some strange legal mechanisms) belong to the public who are making a greater range of demands on their public resource than just fishery and navigation; marine conservation, oil exploration, windfarms and commercial dredging are all making a more complex environment for fishers to operate within and are causing increased scrutiny on the basic operational parameters of the fishing industry. For a variety of legal reasons ranging from marine protected area designations to the rights of the seabed owners it is no longer possible to use any gear type in any area without consideration of the ramifications on other users. Former legal loopholes relating to everything from health and safety to slavery are rapidly being closed in relation to fisheries as the ability to enforce against vessels at sea increases and legal norms are incorporated from elsewhere.
Perhaps no fishery exemplifies the tensions generated by the former freedoms of the sea as much as the scallop fishery. The increasing use of subsea cabling, the establishment of marine protected areas and a larger array of zonal fisheries management measures have all brought scallop dredging into conflict with other marine users as well as increasing focus on gear conflict within the industry particularly those engaged in static fisheries. The introduction of effort controls for over 15 meter vessels via days at sea restrictions in 2015 and other technical measures are the first attempts to directly control the fishery but there is still a long way to go before the public endorsed uses of the sea (and the seabed) are properly protected from perceived wide rights granted to scallop dredgers. It is time to reverse this approach and identify where scallop dredging should take place and control it that way rather than having dredging as a default fishery. Such an approach is the norm in other areas of land management.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Coastal Futures Conference
• Start Date: Jan 20, 2016
• End Date: Jan 21, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Jan 21, 2016
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2019
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: fishing, fisheries, marine conservation, planning management
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/916473
• Publisher URL: http://coastal-futures.net/
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Coastal Futures Conference 2016