The collapse of fishing on Scotland's West Coast: Where was the leadership?

The following is from C.O.A.S.T. Newsletter for February 2011. It is being published here with kind permission from C.O.A.S.T. – Community of Arran Seabed Trust

Where was the leadership?

The UK media’s focus on the urgent need for marine conservation measures has probably never been more intense. Channel 4’s Fish Fight season has set in motion a mushrooming of morbid interest in the drastically unsustainable exploitation of our seas. But it was a smaller news item on BBC Reporting Scotland ('Life after fishing in Mallaig') that has really exposed the sad folly of Scotland’s marine mismanagement.

Mallaig, on the remote Northwest shores of Lochaber, was founded in the 1840s when families were pressured by the local laird to leave their crofts and move to the coast to make a living from fishing. From these difficult, subsistence roots the village became a thriving port, a gateway to the islands and eventually synonymous with a bonanza off herring and prawn fishing. In the 1960s, it was not exaggeration to call Mallaig the busiest herring port in Europe.

But 50 years later, the fishing which breathed life into that crofters' re-settlement has collapsed. BBC Scotland interviewed local skippers from Mallaig, who described with rare West coast emotion, the sadness at seeing their ships taken for decommissioning. Although there was some counter-balancing positivity about diversification, this was the harsh reality of a fishing policy gone wrong.

What seemed so incongruous was the absence of any comment by fishing leaders in the area, usually so quick to expound the views of the industry. It would seem to indicate that the decline of Mallaig's fishing economy is nothing but a shameful chapter for which no-one wants to be accountable. For years the mobile fishing leaders have had a cosy arrangement with government and this has served very well an explosively successful, but highly short-term fishery. The long-term, however, looks bleak. Fishermen have been let down.

It is a bright red herring to say we were dispossessed by Europe. Scotland manages her inshore fisheries up to six miles from land. If even just ten years ago, area control and effort control had been applied at the same time, we might not be in this sad mess, forced to diversify once again - like the crofting forefathers of Mallaig - from what should be a sustainable resource. As fishing communities adapt, perhaps fishermen will look to build new alliances and find fresh leadership to conserve and regenerate the resource that underpins the industry.

Many fishermen are skeptical of area control and are shy of change. But as this organisation’s chairman Howard Wood told a gathering of marine policy-makers at a recent conference in London, "I am the biggest supporter of the Scottish fishing industry." It was an intentionally bold statement and what he meant was this: our leaders in recent decades have sought short-term gain, but C.O.A.S.T.'s vision is for a viable Scottish fishing industry for the future.

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