Salmon management should be about more than fishing limits, and an effective conservation policy must be based on consensus and a realistic definition of sustainability, writes N. P.Wilkins
'Ban drift netting", "stop commercial fishing", "over-exploitation", "mass slaughter at sea" - throughout the 1980s and 1990s, commentary on the Irish salmon resource was widely couched in these terms. The aim was to force changes in the law that would end commercial net fishing for salmon in coastal waters. Catches and stocks were in serious decline and it was felt that something needed to be done to halt this process. It stood to reason that the commercial fisheries must be to blame.
What persuasive arguments could be used to enable the sentiments underlying the slogans to be translated into law? The obvious one was "for conservation", more particularly to conserve wild salmon stocks. But there is no consensus over the meaning of conservation.
One definition is "preservation from harm or decay, or protection from loss or consumption", and many people would be happy with this. Many would also hold the view that living things are worth protecting and conserving for their own sake, not just because they may be of value to man. So conservation of wild salmon stocks then means doing nothing to harm the fish or their habitat.
True conservation of wild stocks implies that we refrain from all actions that impact on them, even positive actions such as habitat rehabilitation and stock enhancement, leaving natural selection to determine the abundance and nature of the stocks. That is the only way we can truly conserve wild stocks. Obviously, with such an approach, legislation would end up prohibiting all management action, good and bad. That would be unrealistic and therefore the appeal to pure conservation alone as a reason for a legislative ban on commercial fishing was always hollow and inadequate. It certainly never impressed Irish coastal fishermen.
But modern definitions of conservation are much less stringent than we might think: one, for example, says it is "the protection, improvement and wise use of natural resources to provide the greatest social and economic value for the present and the future".
From this perspective, the idea of conserving something "for its own sake" is replaced by the idea of its sustainable use because it has a value to the user. Taking this approach, sustainability can replace conservation as a real and practical basis for legislation to protect wild salmon stocks.
This is more than a mere change in words. Sustainability involves language and behaviour that are more inclusive and more management-orientated, taking account of the needs of all the users and of the common good. It encourages the sharing and balancing of rights and benefits, the enhancement and restoration of stocks where necessary, and regulation in the common interest of the resource and of the users. It identifies the different parties as stakeholders in the resource, rather than as simple exploiters.
In Ireland, the net fishery for salmon has an economic and social value in coastal communities. At the same time, salmon has a leisure and economic value because of angling by tourists and locals. The terminology quoted at the start of this article is not primarily the language of conservation, although it may seem to be. It is language about the way in which salmon ought to be divided between the angling and the commercial interests. It implies that no share at all should be allocated to the net fishermen.
Examples of what I call the "cross-wiring" of language and logic - where the language purports to be based on one idea but in fact relies on another - are common in resource-use conflicts. For instance, when the European Commission justified, on wide conservation grounds, certain policies affecting sea fisheries in the Irish box, fishermen's representatives D. O'Driscoll and T. Hassett, in a 1996 letter to The Irish Times, responded that the Commissioner's "philosophy and concepts are anathema to us . . . Conservation is the battlecry which she and other EU figures use and everyone has to agree with that. If this is so, why did the EU allow 40 extra Spanish vessels into Ireland's coastal waters from January 1st, 1996? This wasn't supposed to happen until the year 2002".
Another example of cross-wiring concerns one of the allegedly most cogent arguments used by "conservationists" in favour of banning salmon nets. The value of a salmon caught by a tourist angler is said to be many times the value of a net-caught salmon, and therefore the net fishery ought to be banned or bought out. This, of course, is not a conservation argument at all (although it may be a good reason to rebalance the catch towards greater harvesting on land). Such economic arguments are based on the logic of sustainability, not of conservation. If the economic benefit of tourist angling is to be an appropriate consideration, then simple equity and plain economics dictate that it needs to be balanced with the complex social and economic consequences to coastal communities of the closure of the net fisheries.
Thankfully, the Indecon report, recently delivered by international economic consultants to the Central Fisheries Board seems to have taken this approach. The Salmon Management Task Force set up by Eamon Gilmore in 1996 emphasised "sustainability" over a strictly "conservationist" outlook.
Acknowledging the legitimacy of the commercial sector and guaranteeing it a share in the resource signalled the profound change in attitude that the task force was attempting to foster. To have recommended an outright ban on commercial net fishing would have pushed the net fishermen further away from management and regulation, and could thereby have exacerbated the trend to unregulated net fishing. It would have alienated legislators in coastal constituencies from their constituents and would have greatly increased the difficulties facing regional fishery managers.
Their inclusion was seen by some as a failure to support conservation. But, in fact, the inclusive approach proved to be a singular success and the commercial fishermen, up until then largely marginalised and excluded from management of the resource (on which their livelihood depended), became central to its success. They were brought firmly within the community of stakeholders and given appropriate recognition as legitimate users.
Another innovation was to place the salmon, not the fisheries, at the core of the strategy. It made the spawning escapement its most important element, the one to which every other interest was subservient. This principle was unique in Ireland and is the true heart of conservation. All previous strategies had placed the fisheries at their centre by emphasising catch and effort limitation alone. Salmon management, the task force indicated, is more than fishery limitation.
The salmon that are surplus to the spawning requirement make up the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) in any year. This is what is shared among the users.
The task force proposed that the sharing process - between the netsmen and the anglers - be managed by quotas allocated to each sector. It introduced carcass tags to monitor the catches and to assist the allocation process.
TAC and quota are so often allied that the subtlety of their distinction is sometimes lost. TAC is a pure biological conservation measure - it limits the number of fish to be killed - based on salmon abundance and the carrying capacity of the rivers. These can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy, and changes in TAC, upwards or downwards, are then based on changes in these features.
Quotas, on the other hand, are not conservation actions. They are simply the means whereby the TAC is allocated between different interests. They can be set and altered using criteria that have no relevance whatever to the abundance of salmon. As the task force said: "The apportionment of quotas between the catching sectors, and its rebalancing from timeto time, is a matter of policy to be decided by the Minister."
Legislators can, for instance, decide to alter the quota of any sector for historical, social, economic or any other reasons.
By refusing to be swayed by calls to ban commercial fishing on crude "conservation" grounds, the task force succeeded in creating a new consensus framework for salmon management. It is the idea of sustainability and user value within that framework, not conservation, which justifies the economic analysis of the Indecon report. It remains to be seen if the consensus won by the task force is robust enough to give the Indecon report the careful and balanced consideration it warrants.
N. P. Wilkins is a professor in the Department of Zoology at NUI, Galway. He is former chairman of the salmon management task force. Two weeks ago he addressed the world summit on salmon in Vancouver, Canada.