November 27, 2020 — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday the European Union needed to accept the reality that Britain must control access to its waters if the two were to make progress in Brexit talks on fisheries.
“Our position on fish hasn’t changed. We’ll only be able to make progress if the EU accepts the reality that we must be able to control access to our waters and it’s very important at this stage to emphasise that,” he told parliament.
November 24, 2020 — The United Kingdom’s Fisheries Bill has received Royal Assent after 10 months in Parliament, thereby making it the Fisheries Act, the country’s government has confirmed.
Announcing that the Fisheries Act 2020 had passed into law – representing the United Kingdom’s first major domestic fisheries legislation in nearly 40 years – the government said it would now have control over who fishes in its waters through a new foreign vessel licensing regime, and that the current automatic rights for European Union vessels to fish in U.K. waters have ended.
November 18, 2020 — A no-deal Brexit could lead to a repeat of the “cod wars” between Britian and Iceland across the EU, an Irish fishing group has warned.
Seán O’Donoghue, chief executive of the Killybegs Fishermen’s Organisation, said he was hopeful that “common sense” would prevail and Britain and the EU would reach an agreement on fisheries in the coming days.
“We’ve had the Icelandic Cod Wars in the past,” he told The Times. A no-deal Brexit “would be similar to that”.
Mr O’Donoghue said that there could be disputes in the Irish Sea, around the northwest Irish coast near Scotland, in the English Channel where waters are shared with France, and the North Sea, where some waters are shared with Denmark.
November 13, 2020 — The United Kingdom and Iceland are to increase their collaborative efforts on fisheries matters through a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) that has been signed by U.K. Fisheries Minister Victoria Prentis and Icelandic Minister of Fisheries Kristján Þór Júlíusson. It is the first fisheries agreement ever made between the two countries.
According to the U.K. government, the MOU, which will come into effect on 1 January, 2021, will establish a U.K.-Iceland Fisheries Dialogue, whereby both countries share best-practice and cooperate on a range of issues, including product innovation and food waste reduction. It will also provide a platform for businesses to exchange knowledge on the adoption of new technologies, and ways to enhance the value, traceability and marketing of seafood products.
November 9, 2020 — There has been some progress in talks on a future trade relationship between Britain and the European Union, but both sides are still far apart on fisheries and state aid for companies, the head of the European Commission said on Saturday.
Ursula von der Leyen said on Twitter she agreed in a phone call with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that negotiating teams on both sides would continue to work hard on a deal next week as time is running out to reach and ratify an agreement before Britain’s transition period ends at the end of this year.
“We took stock of the negotiations with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson today. Some progress has been made, but large differences remain especially on level playing field and fisheries,” von der Leyen said.
November 2, 2020 — This week could be crunch time for negotiations on the EU’s future relationship with the U.K. In a sign that a compromise could be struck by the mid-November deadline, officials are close to breaking the deadlock on the access EU boats will have to U.K. fishing waters. The sides have two weeks to finalize an agreement and may pause this week to allow EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier to brief member states and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to give one final push. Although important differences remain — particularly over state aid and the level playing field for business — a deal on fish would remove one of the biggest obstacles.
October 29, 2020 — In the greater scheme of things, fishing is a tiny industry. Just 12,000 people in Britain fish from 6,000 vessels, contributing less than half of one percent of gross domestic product — less than the upmarket London department store Harrods, according to one analysis. The same holds true for most continental European nations.
Yet, as negotiations between Britain and the European Union on a long-term trade deal grind along toward the Dec. 31 deadline, fisheries are proving to be one of the most politically treacherous sticking points. Here’s why the issue is giving negotiators such fits.
Why are fisheries so important?
Boats from continental Europe have fished off the British coast for centuries, and those communities say they face ruin if they were to be locked out of those waters.
But in Britain, European Union membership has meant sharing British waters with fleets from France or other nations — and sometimes seeing bigger, more modern ships catching a larger proportion of the fish. In one zone off the English coast, 84 percent of the cod is allocated to France and just 9 percent to Britain, according to Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organizations.
The British fishing industry contends that its interests were sacrificed for more profitable sectors when the country joined the European Economic Community, a forerunner to the European Union, in 1973. Now that Britain has left the bloc, they want their fish back.
October 26, 2020 — It’s often said that we know more about deep space than the deep sea. Marine scientists are working to change that. In recent years, technologies to sense, interpret and model the ocean have become more powerful, widespread and cheaper to install and use. Smart buoys bristling with sensors bob in the water and gather data on temperature, salinity, light and noise. Sensitive listening devices towed behind ships scan surrounding waters for life. And samples from good old-fashioned buckets and bottles thrown over the side of research vessels still play an important role in examining water.
As a result of all this activity, marine scientists are swimming in data. Much of it is collected by national oceanographic services or research groups scattered across the world. The quality of this data varies, and so do the ways it is gathered, stored, organised and formatted. All of which presents a problem. Given the ocean is a shared resource, and one that is growing in importance for a number of environmental, social and economic reasons, it would be better if all of these overlapping, conflicting and incompatible data streams could be organised – or at the very least, better coordinated and made more accessible.
“In the past, the gathering of marine data was quite territorial, with people collecting data within different sectors and sometimes being quite possessive,” says Clare Postlethwaite, an oceanographer who coordinates the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) in the UK. “Now there’s a big push to get data into a single place for users to find.”
October 7, 2020 — Twenty or so small boats, slung with orange floats and lobster pots and bearing banners reading “SAVE BRITAIN’S FISH” and “COASTAL COMMUNITIES COUNT,” chugged out of the harbor into the bay. The flotilla set off rockets and flares, and orange and white smoke billowed out over the English Channel. The unusual episode—part protest, part distress call—was replicated in port towns across Britain in April 2018. “You get pushed that far, you’ve got to do something,” Dave Pitman, 65, a third-generation trawlerman who took part in the demonstration, said in an interview this August.
At issue was the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), a European Union agreement that gives European boats access to British waters and which, critics claim, has decimated the U.K.’s fishing industry. The country remains in the CFP while it negotiates its exit from the EU, which Fishing for Leave spokesman Arron Banks said in a statement at the time gives Europe the opportunity “to cull what’s left of the UK fleet.” He added, “Brexit creates a golden opportunity to regain 70 per cent of the UK’s fisheries resources and rejuvenate a multi-billion pound industry for the nation.”
September 11, 2020 — Allowing the United Kingdom and the European Union to part ways at the end of this year without an agreement on fisheries in place post-Brexit would open the door to overfishing and pose a serious risk to many fish stocks and marine ecosystems, campaign groups have warned.
On 8 September, the E.U. and U.K. began a new round of post-Brexit trade deal negotiations, with fisheries and fishing rights again expected to take center stage as one of the main obstacles to a broader deal.