Election '97: EU must cut fleets to save stocks

Europe must cut back on overfishing to protect threatened stocks, and so there must be deep cuts in the size of the union's fishing fleets.

The media and politicians were in danger of losing sight of this awkward imperative yesterday, as John Major and Tony Blair competed to show just how tough they were willing to be with the rest of the EU in order to get ''quota-hoppers'' dealt with.

Britain's own fishery scientists have warned that there is a very real threat of some North Sea and Channel stocks, such as cod, collapsing.

John Gummer, Secretary of State for the Environment and a former fisheries minister, says he believes they are right and has demanded action, including more decommissioning.

Yet Britain has been among the worst laggards in the European Union in coming up with state funds to tempt fishermen to scrap their boats. Even so, about 600 out of 3,000 boats have been decommissioned here since the UK scheme started in 1992.

The fishing industry knows stock collapses are not just a threat. It happened to North Sea herring and mackerel in the 1970s, and by 1978 an annual herring catch which had stood at more than 700,000 tons eight years earlier had fallen to nothing. Herring stocks recovered in the North Sea; mackerel has not.

Cod do not breed until the age of four, but the majority are caught before then. The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, the expert international body which officially advises Europe on the state of stocks, says the cod ''is considered to be outside safe biological limits.'' Stocks of North Sea haddock are also judged to be well below the ''minimum biological acceptable level", as are several other commercially important types of fish.

Ideally, what is needed is a very deep, prolonged cut in fishing - even deeper than the 20 to 30 per cent the European Commission is calling for. This would allow the number of breeding adults to recover to a level where more fish could be caught each year than are taken now.

But the problem with this is that the fishermen would want compensation for laying off - and the totals for a large proportion of them giving up for several years are enough to make taxpayers and Treasuries balk. Yet it is the fishermen who will be hurt most if the scientists prove right and the North Sea suffers ecological collapse.

If the quota-hoppers from Spain and The Netherlands, who now catch about a fifth of Britain's quotas under the Common Fisheries Policy, were to simply vanish, then that would amount to the kind of cuts the European Commission is demanding.

But, of course, they won't and can't just disappear. They purchased licences and vessels in good faith from British fishermen who were willing to sell to them, as part of a free-trading European Union.

However high the Conservative and Labour Parties raise the stakes with talk of refusing to let the EU's crucial Intergovernmental Conference negotiations conclude in June, the next government will find dealing with the quota-hoppers extremely difficult.