Tag Archives: demersal trawling
Divide and Conquer – With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies
Try and imagine a campaign by environmental NGOs to end the use of ploughs in agriculture, on the basis that it’s damaging to the biodiversity of rural regions and wrecks natural habitats. The immediate question would be what effect such a limitation would have on the availability of food. Turn it around and apply that question to demersal trawling, and nobody in authority or at any ENGO seems to equate fish with food. Fishing in Europe (and the UK, where the political climate in this respect remains much the same) has been under a wholesale assault from organisations that have little love for fishermen, yet the fishing industry itself remains at odds with itself, frequently doing the work of fishing’s opponents for them. The tactics are now familiar, pick as a target a relatively small sector over which there are already deep divisions within the industry, and go from there to deepen the divides, play on old enmities and appeal to long-held prejudices, and nurture the tall poppy syndrome. >click to read< 12:54
