“Fishermen are part of the coast”
A trade forced to give up
by Marita Brune-Koch and Georg Koch
(6 September 2021) Freest is one of the last idyllic fishing villages on the German Baltic coast, near the island of Usedom. Fishing boats are rocking in the harbour. Nets, ropes and other fishing utensils complete the picture. Everything seems to be fine. But the idyll is deceptive. The fishermen can no longer make a living off fishing. The EU puts an end to them with its regulations.
On the huts skirting the harbour there are placards attached: “EU fishing policy bans fishing” is written there, or: “Save fishing in M-V” (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, German federal state on the Baltic coast). Another one provides ample food for thought: “EU policy and research are ruining us fishermen”.
We want to know what exactly is going on and ask Mr Bohnekamp,1 a professional fisherman from the fishing village Freest. He has made a living for himself and his family here for more than 30 years. He tells us that the EU has reduced the catch quotas for the different fish types to such an extent that we can no longer make a living off it. Many fishermen have already given up and retired.
In front of us is a rather large fishing vessel, pointed out by Mr Bohnekamp. With a length of eight metres, it is the biggest one here; there used to be about a hundred of those, but this is the last one of its size. There are hardly any young trainees anymore. His apprentice sits next to him while we talk to Mr Bohnekamp. He is the only one for miles who is still learning the trade. His master advises him against it; the trade has no future. But the young man wants to keep going for the time being.
(pictures gk)
Deliberate decline of fishing in German waters
We ask about the reason for the quota reduction. Mr Bohnekamp says there is talk of overfishing. However, the catch quota for Norway, a non-EU country, has been massively increased. He doesn’t know why. He also mentioned that there have always been some years with plenty of herring and others with very few. Such fluctuations are natural. He also tells us that now there is a ban to fish the sea beds with trawls. This means that the algae on the sea bed are no longer stirred up, so there are fewer worms and the flounder have too little to feed on. Those you still catch today are half-starved. They used to be much meatier.
In addition to the low catch quotas, an extremely low price also contributes to the decline of the fishery: today, a fisherman gets 50 cents for a kilo of herring. At that price the work is hardly worthwhile, the experienced fisherman sums up.
The consequences are as always in such cases: the decline of one professional branch has a chain reaction on many others. There is hardly any manufacturing industry here anymore, Poland is the last place. Considering the village has a complete infrastructure for packing, processing and selling fish, including a large chilling room that keeps the fish fresh immediately after it is caught.
Everything is perfectly organised and set up, run cooperatively for all the fishermen here. Now the processing is no longer worthwhile. It is carried out in Poland instead. If the motor of the fishing boat broke down, it would be hard to find a mechanic who could repair it. Even heating engineers are hard to find, not even for houses. So one thing leads to another.
We want to know whether there are any members of parliament in Brussels or a lobby that would stand up for their interests. “No”, he replies, “those who used to stand up for the fisheries here have all died in the meantime, and there aren’t any new ones”.
Mr Bohnekamp feels utterly cheated by the Brussels bureaucracy, he is convinced that far-reaching decisions are made over their heads without any expertise or insight into the matter. “Fishermen are part of the coast”, he asserts, “but the EU doesn't seem to look at it that way.”
We check official documents on the development of fishing quotas and find Mr Bohnekamp's statements about recent developments confirmed. The EU Council has massively reduced catch quotas for important fish species relevant to the German fisheries, especially on the Baltic coast.2
In contrast, Norway, a non-EU country, was able to provide a lot better for its fishermen: while throughout the EU the herring catch was limited to about 103,000 tonnes, Norway negotiated with the EU and England that their fishermen would be allowed to fish 187,000 tonnes of herring in the North Sea this year. Mr Bohnekamp knows this and is accordingly incensed about the regulations for the Baltic Sea and Germany.
Cormorants and seals feed on the rest
It is not only the low fishing quotas that contribute to the fact that fishermen are no longer allowed to catch enough. There are also the cormorants. “100,000 cormorants eat 80 tonnes of fish every day and thousands of seals feed on the rest. Traditional fishing is history”, is written on one of the placards in the harbour. This problem is causing trouble for fishermen anywhere in Germany; we know it from the Mecklenburg Lake District and Lake Constance, for example.
Mr Bohnekamp’s colleague joins the conversation and confirms: “The cormorant is a protected species. ‘Bird of the Year’.” He laughs bitterly. It's true, in 2010 the cormorant was “Bird of the Year”. We saw trees on the banks of forest lakes in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania that were completely bare in the middle of summer, with cormorants perched on all the branches like vultures. They destroy the vegetation with their mass excretions.3
Mr Bohnekamp aptly speaks of ghost forests. If you look at the official state statistics of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, there have been constantly more than 50,000 breeding cormorant pairs since about 1994, so its existence no longer seems to be endangered. According to the EU Birds Directive, the cormorant may only be hunted in the vicinity of fish ponds in order to scare it away. Obviously, this permission is not sufficient to protect fish stocks and nature.
“... and the seals feed on the rest”. These largest marine mammals of the Baltic and North Sea were also once species endangered of extinction, and were subsequently placed under nature conservation and are now a tourist attraction. We too have taken part in trips to the sandbanks where these interesting animals breed. But in the meantime, the populations have grown enormously and there is no longer any question of being endangered. Now the seals are endangering the existence of a human species: the fishermen. According to the ministry, the Institute for Fish and the Environment has estimated the damage caused by seals in herring fishing at a loss of about six percent of the catch, in a study conducted over several years.
Destroying the economic structure of a region – to what end?
When one takes into account the effects of the quasi-professional ban from Brussels on fishermen and the destroying of all sectors affected, including families and villages, the statements of the responsible Minister of Agriculture, Julia Klöckner, are sheer mockery: “Under our presidency the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council have agreed on promoting the permanent decommissioning of fishing vessels in the Baltic Sea. This is important to buffer the serious effects for the affected fishermen and to offer them an economic perspective.” In other words, fishermen are offered compensation to give up fishing for good. They get a pittance for being side tracked.
Marine biologist Thilo Maack of the environmental organisation Greenpeace supports this approach. It is “right to pay fishermen transitional money. However, it must be checked for the catches to actually stop.”4 No wonder that the fishermen blame Greenpeace as well as the EU for their decline. It is questionable whether it is really only concern for overfishing of the seas that is promoting these bans. After all, there are increasingly organisations such as the animal protection organisation PETA, which have taken up the cause of abolishing all fish consumption and fishing. Vegans have an ever bigger lobby!
Seek regional solutions for regional problems
The EU decides in Brussels what should be done and in what way throughout the EU, from Portugal to Romania, from the Baltic and North Sea to the Mediterranean. Farmers have always been filled with concern for the preservation and improvement of their soil, they knew and know best how to do this in their region with its particular environmental and soil conditions. It can be assumed that this precautionary principle and knowledge of their environment and conditions also applies to fishermen. In any case, Mr Bohnekamp explained to us that with herring it has always been the case that there have been good years when there were great numbers of herring schools and bad years when there were almost no herring at all. This had nothing to do with overfishing. We had the impression that he knew what he was talking about. 30 years of experience and that of his ancestors have accumulated knowledge and profound expertise. Would it not be appropriate to leave the care of the fishing grounds as well as the soils to the regionally based experts or at least to involve them to a greater extent? At any rate, Switzerland did well to reject the framework agreement with the EU. Otherwise, Brussels would sooner or later interfere even more in Swiss agriculture than is already the case today.
Conservation of nature and species with a sense of proportion
It seems doubtful whether “nature and species conservation” is always reasonable. The example of “cormorant conservation” makes one think. By protecting them, they multiply and cause great damage to forests and lakes, for example, which are also supposed to be protected. In our latitudes, they have no natural enemy except man. There are untold similar examples. On an island off Tasmania, for example, the Tasmanian devil was declared to be endangered. This marsupial is a predator. Eventually, they destroyed the colony of 3000 little penguins on the island and decimated the population of short-tailed shearwaters. Ornithologists call it a disaster.5
(Translation «Swiss Standpoint»)
1 The name has been changed. The correct name is known to the editors.
2 Source: Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture https://www.bmel.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/204-agrarrat-luxemburg-fischerei.html
3 Source: https://www.wir-sind-mueritzer.de/allgemein/kormorane-verwandeln-baeume-am-warnker-see/
4 Süddeutsche Zeitung from 23 September 2020
5 “True to their nature: endangered Tasmanian devils destroy penguin colony on small island off Tasmania.” de.rt.com from 23 June 2021