From words to actions.

I recently attended a conference organised by “Östersjö kontraktet” “the Baltic Sea contract

https://www.ostersjokontraktet.se/en/

The goal of the conference was.

Clarify the obstacles that hinder the sustainable future of herrings and Baltic herrings in the Baltic Sea.

Two major questions were put to the guest speakers.

Which actions need to be implemented to save the plight of herrings and Baltic herrings in the Baltic Sea?

and

Why haven’t these actions already been implemented?

I wrote about the plight of our herrings in an earlier post, when I received an invite to the conference, I thought I should get some more background information before becoming more opinionated.

Our conference started with a quick introduction, we had a good conference moderator and a sponsor film, before the guest speakers were introduced and rolled out,

We listened to representatives from different branch organisations, lobby groups, environmentalists, regional politicians, EU politicians, national politicians, environment scientists, “big” fisheries lobbyists, animal well being researcher, local fisherman, and various fisheries regulators and advisors.

They all tabled their opinions and made their presentations and motivated their own agenda, funnily enough they all agreed that there are multitude of contributing factors caused by other people, other countries, environmental factors, time factors and miss communication all of these factors of course underline the collapse of the herring species in the Baltic.

Obviously, no one speaker took ant responsibility or confirmed any action that would make an immediate positive change.

Some of the issues that I as a layman understood were:

Chemical run off:

This seems to be an ongoing issue that is slowly being addressed in all Baltic Sea countries, this is obviously one of the main challenges for all neighbouring countries.

This I assume is slowly improving as more and more countries are addressing their own pollution issues. This eutrophication or fertilizer chemical run off from farms, industry and cities is blamed for the decimation of the Baltic cod population, algae blooming killing of the seabed and natural environment. Chemical run off is the scape goat used by these neighbouring countries when they motivate their opinions regarding the plight of the Herrings, and there’s surely a large portion of truth in that.

Water temperature:

Long term studies have shown periods of warming of the Baltic and erratic temperature fluctuations, these fluctuations change feed fish availability, aquatic plant life cycles and fish migrating patterns.

Its now even possible to catch blue fin tuna in Swedish waters, maybe not in the Baltic but they are moving up our west coast. This of course is blamed on climate change and there’s no quick fix to this problem, we were informed that the plight of the herrings so immediate changes need to be made, for me any climate change improvement is a long-term proposal and therefore shouldn’t be part of the initial fix it equation.

E.U. fishing quotas:

This seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks, all eleven experts had their own interpretation of the quota system.

I got the impression that its an old system based on traditional fishing norms, the volume is based on a prognosis and recommendations from “ICES” The international council for the exploration of the sea. Their prognosis is based on the maximum fishable volume as per historic catches in the Baltic this total volume is then split out to each country then divided again into costal, regional and international waters which is then managed by their own national fisheries body.

One thing is certain E.U. fishing quotas are a slow-moving parasite ridden dinosaur with no sharp teeth still clinging on to a age old language that no one understands.

Apparently last year’s scientific quota recommendations weren’t considered by ICES and the E.U. which of course led to increased volumes being determined by our governing bodies.

Even the transparency regulations for quote distribution weren’t followed, these quotes were given to the “big fish” which in turn must almost open bribery accusations?

Overfishing:

Overfishing is done by big fishing trawlers with huge nets and volumes to fill, these catches are then turned into fish meal which is then used to fed to Scandinavian fish farms, pig farms and mink farms. These larger volume catches fill the international part of the national quota with the migrating herring in open water.

These volume trawlers are vacuuming the herring runs, migration and schooling, catching all the herring before they reach the costal spawning areas, and in turn stealing the livelihood of the local fishermen.

The costal fishermen and their small-scale industries are disappearing quick as they have no fish to catch. This was a hot topic that all could agree upon. This almost unanimous contentious agreeance gave respite to some of the speakers and their organisations opening for a loophole and being able to hide behind E.U. resolutions.

One catch 22 solution that was put forward by the lobbyist was, everybody should eat more herrings and Baltic herrings this would improve the value of the catch thus creating better infrastructure and possibilities, our local fisherman argued that there are no fish because you “big fish” companies take them all.

It is a David and Goliath stand of but in my book it sounds like a traditional corporate greed policy. A gutsy argument and effort from the local fisherman.

The Baltic neighbours:

There are 10 countries bordering on to the Baltic, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Denmark.

Apparently only Sweden sees the overfishing of herring stocks as the main cause leading to their disappearance, all the other countries blame the chemical run off and pollution of the Baltic as the cause of this phenomenon. We can only hope that all the neighbouring countries are working hard to clean up their own back yard. Their improvements eventually will one day give a win-win result when combined with a super trawler ban.

Finland and Denmark are the main "big fish" operators in the fish meal supply chain, producing both for their domestic market, pig farms in Denmark and mink farms in Finland and of course Norway’s Salmon industry. A locak orange fish under a lot of scrutiny.

Political decision making:

Our national minister, EU parliament member and local politician, could all commit to a cross-party effort to improve their own and their parties’ efforts to move forward and find solutions, lobby the right national and international groups and improve the herring situation.

But of course, they didn’t make any decisions. They managed to dodge around a while and implored on us on how complicated and multi-faceted the challenge is, while underlying the cultural importance of the herrings in Sweden.

One question that reflects our lack of common sense and underlies just how stupid this discussion swayed, a fisherman in Sweden cannot sell locally his fish guts and heads as pet food because the fish has specific WWF restrictions, as an option he could drive guts and trimmings over to Finland, they in turn could make fish meal of it and sell it back to Sweden as pet food, or the fisherman can throw the guts and heads back into the Baltic for the seagulls.

Our market economy compounds this challenge, the “big fish” make more money in feeding the salmon, pork and mink industries and contribute more in taxes to their national economists than they can put a figure on the local small industries and their wellbeing. I bet nobody has ever heard that before.

Where are we today:

There are a lot of groups, people and organisations with fantastic intentions involved in and volunteering to save the Baltic Sea and the herring populations, all credence to these individuals.

The Baltic and its herrings seem to be netted in a long-term political debate with no winner insight, only losers.

By the time the E.U. “big fish” lobby groups and fish meal companies can get their shit sorted the local fisherman will be an extinct profession, and there’s a risk that the herrings will have become another dodo bird.

From a laymans point of view- I don't think we've gotten past go yet.