David's Digest

Earlier this week I went, with a group of LEAF farmers on a course, to Grimsby fish market. To our unpracticed eyes it all seemed rather chaotic as autioneers and buyers in the harbourside shed crowded round the boxes of fish. There were cod, haddock, place, one enormous halibut and red fish whose name I never caught. But the white coated insiders knew exactly what they were doing - just as we farmers would at a cattle or sheep market.

But the saddest thing we learned was that whereas fifty years ago hundreds of trawlers were based there, these days only about twenty fishing boats work out of Grimsby. Between them they account for about ten percent of all the fish handled through the port. The other 90% are imported from Iceland, Norway and the Faroes. That said, Grimsby facilities and expertise are still used to process 70% of the fish consumed in this country. Its just that most are caught in Icelandic waters instead of the North Sea, landed at Reykjavik, then trans-shipped to Grimsby for the UK market. Among other things it means most of the "fresh" fish we eat in this country will have been caught at least a week previously.

The decline of this once prosperous port has been brought about, we were told, more by misguided EU quota regulations together with the waste of fish caused by fishermen having to discard all undersized fish they catch because they are not allowed to land them than by over fishing. And all around the coast the UK fleet has been decimated in the same way and for the same reasons.

We farmers felt their pain and hoped fervently that our industry would not be similarly destroyed by regulations written by uninformed bureacrats who had never set foot on a fishing boat or a farm. But we recognised the parallels and were not at all complacent as we left the sad run down town.