The EU and the UK are locked in future-relationship talks this week, with the direction of the discussions hanging heavily on the question of whether progress can be made on fish.
No fewer than four sessions on fishing rights have taken place during this week’s round of virtual negotiations — more than on any other topic. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has said the bloc will never sign a trade deal with the UK unless the question of EU access to British waters is resolved.
Mr Barnier last month expressed his hope that both sides were leaving behind “maximalist positions”, but that optimism proved fleeting. One EU official said on Thursday morning that the talks on fish had been “more disappointing than we’d have hoped”.
Formidable obstacles remain to getting a deal, not least because the pandemic has made EU governments even more determined to protect an economically precarious sector whose finances have been hammered by the lockdown.
What are the prospects for progress on fish?
The politics are brutally hard. Brexiters see fish as central to the benefits of leaving the EU and becoming an independent coastal state, while losing access to UK waters at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31 would be a heavy blow to the European fisheries sector.
The two sides have starting positions that are diametrically opposed, with the UK emphasising its determination to break free of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy and the EU trying to retain as many of its existing rights as possible.
Expectations were raised when Mr Barnier said after the previous negotiating round with Britain that there had been “some start of a dialogue”, but any hopes of swift progress evaporated when EU member states dug in on their demands that the deal “uphold” existing rights.
What is the urgency?
Britain’s waters are an essential resource for fishermen from countries such as France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Industries have been built around fishing rights that have existed since the start of the CFP in the 1970s and sometimes for far longer.
Both the UK and EU agreed last year as part of a political declaration on future relations to seek an agreement by July 1, although EU diplomats say there is no expectation this deadline will be met.
Failure to reach a deal soon will lead to mounting anxiety for EU fishermen. The EU will soon begin its annual process of determining fishing rights in its waters for the following calendar year. At the moment, there is no way of knowing what access there might be to the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone, which can stretch as far as 200 nautical miles from the coast.
What would a treaty resolve?
Its central purpose would be to settle fishing rights to around 75 different species that straddle UK and EU waters. They include staples of the European diet such as herring, mackerel and sole.
Under international law, those stocks would need to be jointly and sustainably managed — a process that would involve Britain, the EU and other relevant players such as Norway agreeing each year on an overall maximum catch amount. Those fishing rights would then be divided up among the different countries — in other words they each would be allocated quotas for how much their fishermen could catch.
The treaty would also need to address the basic issue of access to UK waters as well as questions of environmental sustainability. EU officials and campaign groups have warned the UK’s draft proposal for the future fisheries agreement does not replicate legally binding obligations in the CFP to curb overfishing.
How far apart are the two sides?
Britain is happy to have annual talks with the EU on fishing rights, but is deeply resistant to the idea of giving the EU long-term guarantees about access to British waters and quotas.
The difficulties are compounded by the fact that EU governments have handed the European Commission an extremely rigid negotiating position that essentially amounts to replicating the quota shares that exist now.
Under the CFP, total allowable catch figures for different types of fish are negotiated annually by EU ministers, but the respective share each EU country has of the overall pie is set in stone: national quotas were settled in the early 1980s, based on fishing trends from the 1970s.
What is the UK objection?
The UK argues that the EU approach is outdated, unscientific and an affront to its sovereignty.
The British position is that fishing rights should depend on where the fish predominantly are — a model known as “zonal attachment”. There are various ways to measure this (catch data, scientific fishing expeditions, measuring the habitable area), but the basic fact is that zonal attachment would lead to a far greater share for the UK of fish in British territorial waters.
According to a UK government paper from July 2018, Britain’s share of fishing rights for saithe off the west of Scotland, for example, could jump from 32 per cent under the CFP, to 96 per cent under a zonal attachment model; its share of haddock in the Irish Sea could jump from 48 per cent to 83 per cent.
Mr Barnier suggested last month that a compromise could take on board ideas of zonal attachment as one part of a package of “elements” used to determine fishing rights.
How might a solution be found?
Mr Barnier’s hope is that the UK can be convinced to at least partially back down — but the EU fishing states will need to accept that Brexit will have an effect on the status quo.
Britain is heavily dependent on the European market to sell some of the most lucrative species caught by UK fishermen, including scallops and langoustines. In some cases, the dependency on the EU market is over 90 per cent. The UK also enjoys a trade surplus with the EU on fish.
Without a trade deal, that market access would become much more constrained. So the UK has incentives to do a deal.
But diplomats also fear that talks will remain bogged down unless and until Mr Barnier can secure a more flexible mandate from the eight EU states whose fishing sectors stand to be hit hardest by loss of access to British waters. One EU diplomat said any such movement may not now come until September, raising the prospects of mounting tensions over the summer.
