The North Atlantic Pelagic Advocacy Group (NAPA) has launched a new campaign and film to push regional governments to reduce overfishing of mackerel in the Northeast Atlantic.
NAPA was formed in 2019 in response to ongoing issues with overfishing of Northeast Atlantic mackerel, spring spawning herring, and blue whiting. State-level disagreements on how the total allowable catch (TAC) of the species have resulted in a political impasse that causes the stocks to be overfished despite agreement on what the maximum sustainable yield is.
The continued inability to reach an agreement has led to multiple species losing Marine Stewardship Council certification and having sustainability metrics downgraded by environmental organizations – with the most recent instance being the Marine Conservation Society downgrading Northeast Atlantic mackerel.
NAPA extended its fishery improvement projects covering the pelagic stocks in the Northeast Atlantic for two years in 2024, giving the coastal states more time to rectify continued overfishing of the stocks, but it continues to call out the six coastal states involved – Norway, the E.U., U.K., Iceland, Faroe Islands, and Greenland – for failing to agree.
“This film points to a serious, collective failure of governments. We need the Coastal States to rethink their attitudes to agreement and collectively bring catches down in line with the scientific advice,” NAPA Mackerel Subgroup Chair Chris Shearlock, who is also the ambient sustainability director at Thai Union, said. “Mackerel is the perfect example of a failure of leadership from our Coastal States’ governments – short-term thinking and disagreements blinding negotiators to a chance to secure generational sustainability for the stock.”
NAPA’s new campaign against overfishing consists of a short film dubbed “Mackerel Maths,” which the organization said is a call to action featuring six schoolchildren given a mock mackerel fishery to manage, lampooning how the six member states managing the stock have consistently been unable to reach any agreement.
“The eye-opening result was discussion, consensus, and even acceptance of losses for some of the ‘fishing nations.’ There is a serious point at the heart of this campaign film: Even schoolchildren can see that there’s no way to keep taking more than the total available, and collaboration is the only way forward,” NAPA said. “Perhaps Coastal States need to go back to school.”
NAPA said that there is just 12 months left for member states to take action, or many of its members will stop sourcing from Northeast pelagic stocks.
“Coastal States only have until April 2026 to come together to end the overfishing of mackerel. In 15 years, they have failed to do so, and the need for progress is now urgent,” NAPA Project Lead Rob Blyth-Skyrme said.
