Over the past few weeks, the limelight has been hogged
rather selfishly by the United States of America’s presidential elections.
Now that we are prepared to see absolutely no change whatsoever over the next four
years, it is time to find another bucket to put all our eggs in. (Apologies to
any vegans, you can just put your sawdust in or whatever it is that you eat)
Happily, however, some recent research has yielded a very
promising candidate – the EU’s now-defunct Common Fishing Policy (CFP). To
understand just how hilariously appalling this policy was, it is necessary to
take a history lesson. In the early 1970s, nations with rich waters (the UK,
Denmark, Ireland etc) applied to join the EU. The EU’s erstwhile members
decided to engineer a rather clever underhand strategy to “share” the entire
fishing catch. The resulting policy outlined exactly what fish were to be
caught, what quantity they were to be caught in, who would catch them and where
they would go.
On paper, this sounds like a rather brilliant idea. Rather
than bear the stench of a street-side fish market (Lassie is Bengali so, sorry
Lassie) the EU’s members could satisfy their needs in a more organised way.
Except the CFP came with one tragic flaw – because the quantities were clearly
defined, any excess fish were considered “illegal”. Since it’s impossible to
tell what fish has been caught until it’s caught, this was a bit of an
obstacle. And since fish die when they’re caught, they can’t be put back. And
finally, since commercial fisherman catch huge schools of fish, the EU’s seas
turned into mass graves.
While many environmental groups have found this to be a
major concern (Lassie is in tears at this point), I just think the situation
illustrates just how bureaucratic and impractical politics can be. Consider the
following situation. Fifty English fishermen catch 120,000 tuna in a week.
Since they were supposed to catch some other fish, they throw the fish back
into the sea. At the end of the month, the English food authority spends £120,000
buying some Danish tuna – whereas it would be much cheaper to buy it from
English fishermen. In 2009, a research paper was published saying that 88% of
the EU’s fish stocks had been overfished and that 30% were outside safe
biological limits. Basically what the EU did with the CFP was to make countries
pay extra in order to damage the environment.
As far as the newspapers go, an” EU Crisis” is when an old man in
Athens can’t afford to buy Starbucks coffee or when David Cameron and Angela
Merkel argue over what flowers to plant outside Trafalgar Square. Personally,
however, I feel that the CFP saga should rank among the EU’s largest crises. On
one hand there are billions of people dying because of malnutrition and on the
other hand you have the EU willingly throwing away tonnes of healthy,
protein-rich food. We keep hearing about how the developed world does its best
to aid the less fortunate and how they bleed money and food and water. Absolute
nonsense. Why would the EU, a group of some of the world’s most respected and
financially powerful nations, throw away huge fish stocks, if they actually had
the best interests of the world or their own people at heart?
It really is a shambolic state of affairs and one can only hope
that the EU replaces the CFP with a policy that actually works. It’s not like
vegetarians buy meat and then set it on fire.
PS: Dear Lassie, I’m sorry for taking so long to write an article.
Also, I hate fish.
- Chap.
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