FSA to revise fish guidelines due to low stocks

Consumers may soon be given official advice on which fish not to eat to avoid wiping out endangered stocks, the Food Standards Agency said yesterday.

The Agency's decision to review the advice it gives on fish represents a U-turn for it has maintained that it should not offer advice about the ecological sustainability of different types of fish since a Royal Commission urged it to do so four years ago.

	Cod, haddock and other North Sea fish in the hold of a trawler

The Agency's review, which will be completed by the end of the year, comes as many leading supermarkets, including Marks and Spencer, Waitrose and Asda, increasingly make it a selling point that the fish that the fish they sell are only from well-managed stocks.

It also comes after Greenpeace and leading chefs last week launched a campaign to persuade consumers to purchase only fish from ecologically-sustainable stocks and WWF introduced a campaign for consumers to avoid "Stinky Fish" which could have been caught illegally.

Both campaigns provoked a strong backlash from the fishing industry, with Fishing News, the industry journal, running the headline "Madness of Greenpeace" on its front page.

The Agency said its review of advice on fishing would also consider the wider environmental impact of fishing and fish farming.

A spokesman said the Agency would still encourage people to eat more fish. Current advice is that they should aim for at least two portions a week of which one should be an oily fish such as mackerel, salmon or trout.

Women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or want to get pregnant should not eat more than two portions of oily fish per week due to the possible presence of pollutants.

Its review is inviting industry bodies, environmental, health and consumer groups for their input.

Rosemary Hignett, head of the Agency's nutrition division, said: "We are aware that fish consumption and sustainability is a key issue for many consumers and current advice can be confusing."

Andy Tait of Greenpeace said: "Fish stocks are in crisis across the globe and any advice related to fish consumption needs to face up to that reality.

"The current advice has a real impact on already over-exploited global fisheries so we welcome that it is now to be reviewed."

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has estimated that if consumers took the Agency's current advice the total level of fish consumption in the UK would need to increase by over 40 per cent, with oily fish consumption increasing by over 200 per cent.

Meanwhile, scientists have reported that fishermen have altered evolution in the sea in a few decades in ways that it was thought previously could only happen over millennia.

Fish such as the North Sea cod, Barents Sea cod and the Northern cod, off Newfoundland, have halved the age at which they reproduce in response to fishing pressure.

This phenomenon has also been observed in plaice, sole, American plaice and yellow croaker, a fish found in Chinese waters, according to Ulf Dieckmann, from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Dr Dieckmann told a meeting at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, that it was possible to demonstate, from excellent records compiled in the 1930s, that the age at which the Barents Sea cod first reproduced had reduced from ten years then to five years today.

The size at which the cod reproduced had fallen from 90-100 cms to 75 cms. The cod also produced half the eggs that they did in the 1930s, so the changes caused the stock to be over-fished faster.

Dr Dieckmann said: "It was thought that these changes would only occur over millennia. But it is becoming clear that significant evolution can take place within 20 years if the forces driving it are strong - and in fisheries they have been."

Dr Dieckmann said that evolution caused by over-fishing took a longer to recover from than it did to cause: if the Barents Sea was closed to fishermen, it would take 250 years for cod to return to spawning at 10 years old.

"This is a Darwinian debt that will have to be paid back by future generations," he added.

Dr Dieckmann said evolution caused by commercial fisheries had played an overlooked part in the collapse of the Northern cod off Newfoundand in 1992, the most disastrous crash yet of a major commercial fish species.

He said that from 1985 a downward trend in the size of spawning cod was detectable off and should have led to "a more precautionary approach" in setting catch quotas.