「经济学人」Fishing rights

How wise

The deal reached by Britain and the European Union on May 19th says nothing about the manufacture of locks and hinges. Nor does it say anything about the condiments-and-seasonings industry, or about carpets and rugs. But it does deal with an industry that, with a turnover in 2023 of £892m ($1.13bn) according to the Office for National Statistics, is smaller than those: fishing.

EU fishing boats will be allowed to operate in British waters until 2038. Catch quotas will be frozen, so British and continental crews will divide the seas’ bounty roughly as they do at present. To British fishermen, this looks like a victory for the EU. They wanted Britain to insist on annual negotiations over access and quotas—something that would have turned continental fishermen into perpetual supplicants, since they catch much more fish in British waters than Britons catch in EU waters.

“Surrender”, spluttered Harriet Cross, a Conservative mp. “Utter betrayal”, said the Scottish White Fish Association. But Britain’s fishing industry is so tiny that no responsible government would privilege its interests over the goal of freer trade overall. Like other industries, fishing will benefit from the scrapping of checks and other non-tariff barriers—perhaps even more so, since fish go off while forms are being filled in. About 70% of British fish exports go to the EU.

Annual negotiations over fishing rights would probably have been fraught, especially since the British industry also desires to change the way that quotas are allocated. Instead of following history and precedent, as they do at the moment, Britain and the EU would consider “zonal attachment”, meaning where the fish live. Good luck working that out for dozens of species every year. “Fish are difficult to count. They move around,” says Bryce Stewart of the Marine Biological Association.

If negotiations between Britain and the EU had ever broken down, all fishermen would have suffered in the long run. With no agreement on how many fish ought to be caught, countries would have been incentivised to haul in far too many, as a tragedy of the commons unfolded. Something like that has happened to mackerel in the north-east Atlantic. A once-plentiful (and very tasty) fish is being over-exploited because of a dispute involving Britain, the EU, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Iceland and Greenland. Better a stable, shoddy deal than a fish war.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Too small to keep”(May 22nd 2025)

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