The Faroe Islands is a very special place, and an especially odd place to visit for someone who writes about the fishing industry. My work takes me regularly across Europe and sometimes beyond, but the experience of the Faroes is unique: Everyone seems happy with the way things are run.
In every EU country there is a bitter debate between fishermen, scientists and politicians at local, national and European levels over how fish stocks should be managed. Quotas, fishing time limitations, horsepower regulations, tonnage limits, vessel capacity units and a host of other measures meld into a confused maelstrom of paper and outright fury that is virtually incomprehensible. In Norway there are have been virulent arguments over the inequalities, perceived or otherwise, of fisheries management policies and in Iceland I have even been stopped on the quayside and harangued by perfect strangers over the iniquity of the ITQ system.
So whats different in the Faroes?
The Faroese fleet operates on a days at sea regime, combined with a variety of closed areas, some closed entirely, some closed seasonally and closed to various gears. Trawling is limited to the outer zones of the EEZ, leaving inshore fishing areas largely to hook-and-line fishing methods. This essentially gives the main cod and haddock fishing grounds to longliners and jiggers, while saithe, also a highly commercially important species, is fished largely by trawlers fishing on grounds further offshore. In addition, there are smaller fisheries for monkfish, flatfish, nephrops and other species that are also limited to various gears, grounds and seasons. There are several categories of vessels and days at sea are not transferable between these categories.
Cod come and go: The origins of days at sea in Faroe the fishing days system go back to the crisis of the early 1990s that saw the country approaching meltdown as both fisheries and the financial sector struggled. Generally, when catches are low, prices tend to rise, but unusually at that time, both catches and prices hit a low point. Boats were sold and factories went bankrupt, prompting a substantial proportion of the population to emigrate.
At the time a system of quotas was seen as the only way to bring fish stocks back up to reasonable levels and a regime of individual quotas was put into place.
Member of Parliament and former fisheries minister Jörgen Niclasen describes the short-lived quotas system as a disaster, commenting that there was immediate evidence of misreporting and high-grading, the practice of discarding smaller fish that although of legal size, are not the ones that fetch the highest prices.
The short-lived flirtation with quotas was abandoned before it even got to the next step, which would have been to make them transferable, as has been done in Iceland, New Zealand, Chile and parts of the EU.
Its not hard to criticize ITQs (inter-transferable quotas), and the various shortcomings of rigid quota systems have been well documented already. The Faroese experience over the past decade is very different and operates in a way that is much more in tune with natural variations. It is accepted that stocks fluctuate and that maintaining each stock at its peak all the time simply does not happen.
In most countries there is an immediate panic when there is an indication that a stock may be weakening, especially a high-value species such as cod, followed by calls for draconian measures that tend normally to be largely ineffective, combined with fishermens fears that once cut, quotas are not likely to be increased.
Its quiet at the moment and we havent been getting a lot of cod, one fisherman told me recently in Klaksvík. But itll be back. Cod come and go from year to year. There was none of the trepidation that follows a poor year class elsewhere and this man was fully confident that the cod would continue to follow the eight to twelve year peak-to-peak cycle of abundance and scarcity that has been observed over the past century and beyond.
Courageous move: Landings of groundfish by the Faroese fleet fluctuate between 80,000 and 120,000 tonnes, with the annual catch averaging just over 100,000 tonnes. Of this, cod varies between 20,000 and 40,000 tonnes and is currently approaching the trough of the cycle.
There would be something wrong if we were catching 40,000 tonnes right now, Mr Niclasen comments.
The outstanding advantages of days at sea are that the criminalization of fishermen that is such an issue in other countries is entirely absent. With limits only on gear type, fishing areas and time at sea, and none on the catches themselves, the idea of discarding fish for which a vessel does not have quota or of landing black fish becomes irrelevant as there is no reason not to land every fish caught that is within the minimum landing size. In the same way high-grading is also not a problem. Customers overseas say to me that the fish from the Faroes is smaller than fish from Iceland, one trader observes. But thats not true. The difference is that here we land small fish as well as big fish.
With no incentive to land anything other than openly, landing figures are remarkably precise, quite possibly giving the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory some of the most accurate catch figures to work with of any European nation.
We had to find a system that worked, recalls Mr Niclasen, who was part of the original committee that was appointed to find a solution and came up with the effort-based approach. Fishing is everything in the Faroe Islands, but policy has to be about peoplefishermen, their families and communities, as well as about fishing itself, so we had to make the right decisions.
At the time, abandoning the accepted wisdom of management with set quotas was a highly courageous move. Throwing out established ideas was not far from heresy and further disasters were prophesied for the Faroes. Some substantial adjustments were made to the days at sea regime with days reduced over several years to begin with to bring everything onto an even keel, but since then only minor alterations have been made. Days at sea are now reckoned in hours instead of full days to allow vessels a greater level of flexibility, so there is no longer a need to be sailing just after midnight and docking as close to midnight as possible to make the most of each full day.
Made to work: There is no doubt that the effort-based fisheries management in the Faroe Islands is successful. Whether or not the Faroese example could be exported successfully is another matter, but progress in the Faroes has been watched carefully by fishermen elsewhere and there are indications that there is a change in the wind as the idea of effort-based fisheries management is being taken increasingly seriously.
But the Faroe Islands independence in making its own way has come at a price. Setting aside ICES recommendations is not done lightly. With no finite quotas in place, in spite of a stable and apparently successful regime, it may in future be less easy to market Faroese fish than fish from a sustainable resource managed according to the prevailing wisdom of fixed quotas and with a stamp from an eco-label.
What is seen as an advantage in that days-at-sea are nationally owned resource can also become a disadvantage for a vessel owner wishing to replace a vessel, as he does not own his days. Days at sea can not be mortgaged in the same way that quotas can be in other countries.
For the fleet of larger longliners in particular, this is a growing problem. Jóhannus Olsen, chairman of Felagið Línuskip, the Faroese Longline Association, explains that this sector of the fleet, while fishing successfully, is not profitable enough for vessels to be renewed and sooner or later there will have to be a change that makes investment easier. But he also makes it plain that he would not want to see a return to fixed quotas instead of days at sea.
At the heart of the success of the Faroese management regime is that the Faroes are a small, compact society, where things can happen quickly. News travels fast, there are few barriers to exchanges of ideas and opinions and members of the government are all easily accessible. The minister of fisheries, as every other minister and member of Parliament, is there in the phone book. Unlike other countries with larger economies and populations, there are very few levels of removal between those who govern and those who are governed.
The key is that when the system was being formulated on the back of an ITQ regime that was clearly not going to work, everyone was involved. Politicians, fishermen and processors all had a hand in getting days-at-sea off the ground. In a country where 95 percent of exports are seafood products, the reliance on fisheries is such that the new system had to workfailure was not an option and with input from every direction, it was made to work.
Common sense: Officials in other countries seem to look on the Faroese experience as a radical and possibly dangerous experiment. With no finite volumes of fish involved, it is very hard for officials to cope with the concept of fishing effort rather than set amounts measures in tonnes. Again, in a small society such as the Faroes, everyone has a cousin or a brother who is a fisherman and the distances between the industry and the regime that governs it are short ones. Effort-based management is not such a difficult concept. It is very difficult not to compare the Faroese example to the neighboring European Union and its top-heavy, highly bureaucratic, cumbersome management regime that currently has recovery plans in progress for a variety of species, and a confused policy that appears to be aimed at managing nature rather than working with it.
The concept that has developed in the Faroe Islands has nothing to do with rejecting science or allowing the rule of nature an entirely free hand. Quite the opposite: the Faroese consider themselves to be keen on embracing progress, using technology and applying advanced knowledge to overcome natural obstacles. But in fisheries policy the Faroese have reached a practical position based on common sense that recognizes the limitations of science and management to work alongside nature rather than against it.
If the fish are there, the fishermen have a good year on the days they have at sea. If the fish arent there, they dont have such a good year, or other species are strong instead. We have to let nature control that herself, Jörgen Niclasen concludes. If we try to control nature instead, then something is going to go wrong.
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