Ban urged on giant factory trawlers
‘Destructive’ fishing in protected marine areas
“DESTRUCTIVE” SUPERTRAWLERS should be banned from fishing in the UK’s protected marine areas, environmentalists have said.
The controversial factory ships can be more than 100 yards long and “vacuum” up huge quantities of fish every day.
A Greenpeace investigation published today has said that 25 supertrawlers – none of which are UK-owned – spent nearly 3,000 hours fishing in marine protected areas (MPAs) in 2019.
Their presence off the UK coast has led to fears over fishing stocks and spikes in numbers of dolphin deaths.
Among them was the Dutchowned Margiris – a 155-yard-long giant vessel that gained notoriety after it was once banned from Australian waters.
MPAs protect important marine ecosystems and species, including porpoises and reefs.
One of the areas most heavily fished in by supertrawlers in 2019 was the Southern North Sea zone, off the east coast of England, which was created to safeguard porpoises.
Chris Thorne, the oceans campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said: “Our Government allowing destructive supertrawlers to fish for thousands of hours every year in Marine Protected Areas makes a mockery of the word ‘protected’.
“Even an hour of supertrawler activity inside an ecologically sensitive marine environment is too much, let alone almost 3,000.
“For our Government to be taken seriously as a leader in marine protection, it must ban supertrawler operations in the UK’s Marine Protected Areas.
“Will our Government heed the recommendations of the Highly Protected Marine Area
review and seize the historic opportunity Brexit provides to fix the UK’s broken network of Marine Protected Areas, or will it allow the flawed status quo to continue?”
Greenpeace investigators used AIS tracking data from the Lloyds Register for all fishing boats over 100m to assess the amount of time spent fishing in UK MPAs. AIS tracking data is available on request.
In total, supertrawlers logged 2,963 hours fishing in UK marine protected areas in 2019, Greenpeace said.
The MPAs where supertrawlers spent the most time fishing last year were at Wyville Thomson Ridge and Faroe-Shetland Sponge Belt off the Shetlands, Geikie Slide and Hebridean Slope and Darwin Mounds off the Hebrides, Offshore Overfalls on the south coast, and Southern North Sea off the east coast of England.
The organisation has launched a petition urging the Government to ban the huge ships from MPAs.