Discards – Trawler Men’s Dirty Secret

What are discards? I hear you say. Discards are the fish trawling fishing vessels throw over the side of the boat dead back into the seas or oceans when quotas are met and they are not allowed to bring onto shore.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall a tv chef from river cottage fame where he grows his own fruit and vegetables and then produces country cooking classics found out about this problem back in Jan 2011. Since then he has been on a crusade petitioning UK and European governments to try and get the madness stopped.

Every vessel in Europe has a quota of fish they are allowed to land when trawling offshore. However the nets they are dragging behind are not designed to harvest one specific species of fish and hence many unwanted fish get caught also. Now in a perfect world the fish would be still alive and be able to be let go un-harmed but when fishing from deep water the resulting rise from the sea floor will kill a lot of these species anyway. Also many die from being crushed in the nets. It's pretty awful to see but any fish that is caught and not in the allowed species quota or over the quota weight has to be thrown over board.

This process equate to approximately one million ton of fish per year thrown back dead in the North Sea alone.

One million ton how many people would that feed?

To be fair the trawler men involved do not want to throw back dead fish into the sea they would rather bring them to shore to be used. This is where the insanity comes in as the policy behind the quotas will not allow them to do this enforcing large fines and embargoes if they infringe the rules.

Although this is still taking place Hugh and his team have been fighting hard and putting good cases forward for better management of the oceans harvest. Some examples are using special box nets that allow small infant species to escape. Also changing the fishing quotas to allow catches to be brought to shore. These resulting un-wanted fish being used in other industries like the fertilizer or pet food industry.

In his encouragement to bring about change Hugh has made several programs showing the fish we would not normally use and making dishes from them which look every bit as tasty as the more common species. These species are also more sustainable as the resulting harvesting of species like cod have declined their numbers to alarming levels which brought about quotas in the first place.

Hugh's fight is not only his but is a concern of everyone who enjoys fishing or eating a tasty bag of fish and chips!