>>Fishermen are the new farmers - Charles Clover, environment editor of The Daily Telegraph
When I got into the business of writing about the environment more than 15 years ago, the farmer was public enemy number one. He got a routine bashing from my colleagues and myself for pulling up hedges, spraying out the skylarks and - it turned out - trying to kill us by feeding animal proteins to herbivores.
Times change. The new public enemies, the new farmers, are fishermen. Somehow as a collective act we have all become more curious about what is happening in the sea.
Don’t take my word for it - though what I learned in writing a book about global overfishing scared me sick.
Fishermen, in collusion with our own ignorant demands, are now the baddies: dragging the sea bed to bring the halibut to Gordon Ramsay’s menu, not telling us what is in the tuna in our tins (answer: endangered bigeye as well as skipjack and yellowfin) or what is caught with tuna (whales, turtles and endangered sharks).
There is a container-load of malodorous media trouble on its way - not just from me - for retailers, and come to that celebrity chefs, who don’t realise that what is going on in our seas is, almost everywhere, a scandal.
It’s time to get real about this. There are, of course, many honourable people in the world of fish who are already trying hard to do the right thing. The Marine Stewardship Council’s initiative to certify sustainably caught sources of fish is going well, if painfully slowly.
It is pulling in a rush of new applicants in the white fish industry such as Norwegian cod, which could transform the European fishing industry more than politicians ever have. North Sea herring is also up for certification - though a large percentage is currently illegally caught.
What is not in progress is much thought about what we might actually prefer - wild or farmed fish.
There has been no human health scare for wild fish - with the possible exception of naturally occurring mercury in tuna and swordfish in the US - with the same resonance in Europe as this year’s paper about dioxins in farmed salmon. Doesn’t this tell you something? People would prefer to eat wild fish, because of the problems we already know can come from intensively farmed animals. Farmed is second best. When it comes to the sea, wild is the equivalent of organic on land.
Organic, as a label on farmed fish, doesn’t give reassurance because of the problem that such fish depend, until alternatives are developed, on wild-caught, ground-up tiddlers. It is time retailers exerted a bit of pressure on politicians to stop this scandal, then maybe set up an independent scheme to certify sustainably farmed fish - currently a major gap.
Sustainably managed wild fish are the organic food of the future. Retailers must put some more thought into how to protect and develop this increasingly precious resource instead of assuming farmed fish will do - for example, by marketing fish that are now sold for fishmeal, such as horse mackerel, to the consumer.
I made a prediction in 1993 that organic produce would be accepted as the quality benchmark for farmed produce. At the time my farming friends thought I was mad and that knobbly carrots would never take off.
At the Royal Show the other day, I noticed farmers going on about their belief in local sourcing, sustainability and traceability - ideas which all originated in the organic movement. They were repeating back what I, and people like me, said then without realising who they were quoting. You won’t catch wild fishermen talking about sustainability.
This is my prediction for the next decade: the sustainability of fish stocks, and the quality of information confirming this, will increasingly be seen as important by the consumer and by retailers. For the survival of plentiful supplies of wild fish is ultimately a human health issue.
Charles Clover, is environment editor of The Daily Telegraph, and has published a new book 'The end of the line; How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat'.
When I got into the business of writing about the environment more than 15 years ago, the farmer was public enemy number one. He got a routine bashing from my colleagues and myself for pulling up hedges, spraying out the skylarks and - it turned out - trying to kill us by feeding animal proteins to herbivores.
Times change. The new public enemies, the new farmers, are fishermen. Somehow as a collective act we have all become more curious about what is happening in the sea.
Don’t take my word for it - though what I learned in writing a book about global overfishing scared me sick.
Fishermen, in collusion with our own ignorant demands, are now the baddies: dragging the sea bed to bring the halibut to Gordon Ramsay’s menu, not telling us what is in the tuna in our tins (answer: endangered bigeye as well as skipjack and yellowfin) or what is caught with tuna (whales, turtles and endangered sharks).
There is a container-load of malodorous media trouble on its way - not just from me - for retailers, and come to that celebrity chefs, who don’t realise that what is going on in our seas is, almost everywhere, a scandal.
It’s time to get real about this. There are, of course, many honourable people in the world of fish who are already trying hard to do the right thing. The Marine Stewardship Council’s initiative to certify sustainably caught sources of fish is going well, if painfully slowly.
It is pulling in a rush of new applicants in the white fish industry such as Norwegian cod, which could transform the European fishing industry more than politicians ever have. North Sea herring is also up for certification - though a large percentage is currently illegally caught.
What is not in progress is much thought about what we might actually prefer - wild or farmed fish.
There has been no human health scare for wild fish - with the possible exception of naturally occurring mercury in tuna and swordfish in the US - with the same resonance in Europe as this year’s paper about dioxins in farmed salmon. Doesn’t this tell you something? People would prefer to eat wild fish, because of the problems we already know can come from intensively farmed animals. Farmed is second best. When it comes to the sea, wild is the equivalent of organic on land.
Organic, as a label on farmed fish, doesn’t give reassurance because of the problem that such fish depend, until alternatives are developed, on wild-caught, ground-up tiddlers. It is time retailers exerted a bit of pressure on politicians to stop this scandal, then maybe set up an independent scheme to certify sustainably farmed fish - currently a major gap.
Sustainably managed wild fish are the organic food of the future. Retailers must put some more thought into how to protect and develop this increasingly precious resource instead of assuming farmed fish will do - for example, by marketing fish that are now sold for fishmeal, such as horse mackerel, to the consumer.
I made a prediction in 1993 that organic produce would be accepted as the quality benchmark for farmed produce. At the time my farming friends thought I was mad and that knobbly carrots would never take off.
At the Royal Show the other day, I noticed farmers going on about their belief in local sourcing, sustainability and traceability - ideas which all originated in the organic movement. They were repeating back what I, and people like me, said then without realising who they were quoting. You won’t catch wild fishermen talking about sustainability.
This is my prediction for the next decade: the sustainability of fish stocks, and the quality of information confirming this, will increasingly be seen as important by the consumer and by retailers. For the survival of plentiful supplies of wild fish is ultimately a human health issue.
Charles Clover, is environment editor of The Daily Telegraph, and has published a new book 'The end of the line; How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat'.
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