Not Good Enough!

This article by Nick Joy first appeared in Fish Farmer Magazine

So here we are again, another body set up to create harmony between the wild and farmed sectors has pronounced its views. Set up just like the Tripartite Working Group, The Salmon Interactions Working Group (SIWG) is another body in a long history of attempts to find a brokered solution to this never ending saga of a badly run industry, full of nostalgic people longing for the catches of their youth attacking a new industry growing the king of fish.

Forgive me my cynicism please, as I have seen and been involved in this area for so long, from naïve junior manager to Managing Director. The groups always start with lofty ideals of government and then descend into lobbying behind the scenes and bad blood usually caused by the same things. In the end a series of recommendations come out, which are aspirational and cause larger numbers of bureaucrats to be employed and little else.

So let’s take a look at these “new” recommendations:

A lead body to take on regulation and planning is proposed. Well, that idea is so old that I am surprised it is still alive. It makes sense but both sides will be coming at it from different directions and therefore it is unlikely to be set up. The wild sector will use their attack dogs (Salmon and Trout Conservation Scotland) to attack it as soon as it makes decisions that they don’t like. Until the wild lobby agree to publicly disavow their attack dogs then there will never be a ‘one stop shop’ for regulation.

It calls for local engagement and a review of Management Areas with protection of wild salmonids as the key component. Again, the two sides will expect different things from this. The farmed side will hope for agreements on a long-term basis to ensure easier management and better coordination. The wild side will want to see farm closures and much greater enforcement. They will also never sign up to a long-term agreement to a farm being in place because as soon as they have succeeded in moving their “priority” farms, they will move on to a new list.

The fundamentals that drive this difference is the ridiculous idea that the wild salmon and sea trout sector are a conservation organisation. They have cleverly played themselves to government as such and both the press and government have allowed themselves to be duped. In general, in Scotland, these sort of fisheries are owned by fairly rich people, who own it and treat it, quite correctly, as an industry because that is what it is. It is a tourism industry which survives by creating a cachet, catching wild migratory fish.

The catches are only significant inasmuch as they must not fall too low or become too high such that those people, who wish to dangle a fish on a line, make it fight for as long as they can and then release it, feel they are unlikely to catch enough during their allotted period. The interesting truth that also follows is that if there are too many fish and you catch one on every cast then the same people quickly become bored and will take up another pastime. The catches have been used by the migratory salmonid angling industry to beat anyone they deem to have contributed to the decline of these wonderful fish. However here again there is a catch, forgive the pun.

Catch statistics depend on fishermen recording their catches accurately. Their relevance to a river’s true capacity has been discussed for many years. If less fishermen fish then less fish are caught. Thus fishing effort and accuracy of recording lie at the centre of whether catches are representative. If you think how difficult it is to get onto a West Coast river through the season, it soon becomes apparent that catch effort is not just about lazy fishermen!

So catches may not be a good indicator. Even more so when you realise that the rateable value of a river is directly related to the number of salmon and sea trout caught on that river. Let me be even clearer, if a river catches less fish then the owner pays less rates. What this means is that a sector which sees itself as an advocacy group for a species it preys upon, has a strong incentive to under report its catches. It is not for me to say whether they do or not but they regularly accuse the salmon farming industry of being corrupt because of what could happen. Yet right at the centre of this debate lies an anomaly which they simply cannot deny.

Nonetheless catches for individual rivers have always been collected by government and collated into areas because they are commercially sensitive. I suppose they are and I suppose that you could argue that you would be telling the thieves where to go to take salmon or sea trout except that these catches are reported after the fact. However when the salmon farming industry argues that sea lice numbers and other data are commercially sensitive the wild salmon lobby suggest it is not important. The new recommendations have a very short paragraph suggesting that the angling industry will release its figures in a more useful form. I, for one, am not going to hold my breath waiting for it.

Oh, and just in case you worried the angling sector are looking for government support for their cause. In plain speak, they are looking for government to lob some money their way. It was ever thus.

The gist of this document is that all recommendations for the farming industry appear to be in bold capitals with the wild industry’s in italics with brackets round them and an Asterix for which the note reads ‘not really necessary’.

Before I round off this rant, in such terrible times, I would like to add my support for the NHS but mention some other unsung heroes who nobody notices. The farmers, the processors, the packers, the transporters, the drivers and supermarket workers all of whom ensure that when the shoppers go to buy their stockpiles, there is still enough to eat.

Thank you from someone whose stomach continues to get larger from too much inactivity but who appreciates that without all of you it couldn’t happen!