The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea is responsible for providing international scientific advice on the status of the major fish stocks in the NE Atlantic.

ICES advice is one of our first stops for advice when evaluating European fisheries. The information is highly technical. Nevertheless, providing an assessment had been made (for many coastal species, there is none) it is usually possible to work out the state of the stock in terms of FAO limit and target reference points.

There should, of course, be a simple lay-person’s guide to the state of each stock, clearly set out in terms of the FAO reference points. Nevertheless, ICES is better than many regional advisory bodies, and it is not entirely ICES’ fault. The adoption of limit and, particularly, target points is a highly political management issue, and ICES is limited to providing scientific advice to managers – although the boundary can be rather fuzzy. Fisheries management is ultimately the ‘competence’ of  the EU Fisheries Council – not the European Commission alone but also the Member States’ national Fisheries Ministers, and many of the poor decisions made over the past decades have been the result of the actions (or inaction) of Member States on the Council hiding behind the convenient ‘bogeyman’ of the European Commission.

More practically, many species caught by inshore fisheries are not assessed, or the scale of assessment is too broad. Either way, the next step is to turn to information from CEFAS, the local Sea Fisheries Committees, MCS’s Fish Online and the MSC.

Chapter and Verse