The newest installment of U.K. celebrity chef-turned-conservationist Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “Fish Fight” series has yet to even air on television, but already the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation (SFF) is speaking out against it, fearing it will present an inaccurate and negative picture of the scallop fishing industry.
The three-part series will begin airing this week on Britain’s Channel 4. The SFF, in a statement, said it anticipated the series would strongly criticize the industry as unsustainable, and called such a characterization “a totally imbalanced and distorted view of the scallop fishing sector.”
SFF Chief Executive Bertie Armstrong offered a defense of the industry, saying that scallop fishermen don’t harshly impact the environment because scallops by definition live in “less sensitive habitats,” and fishing there is safer.
“Scalloping only utilises a very small part of the seabed with vessels consistently fishing the same areas decade after decade,” Armstrong wrote. “To imply that the scallop sector causes wide scale damage is both disingenuous and disproportionate.”
Seafish, and industry body created by the U.K. government, seems to agree with this assessment, noting that towed dredging and other equipment is not used indiscriminately in environmentally-sensitive areas.
“In fact, fishermen know where the species are found and make rational decisions about where to go scallop fishing,” Seafish wrote.
Armstrong also said shutting down traditional scallop fishing and forcing a reversion to traditional hand-diving does not make sense, either economically or environmentally.
“The suggestion by some celebrity chefs that we should eat only hand-dived scallops is wrong and totally impracticable as only 2 percent of scallops are harvested by divers, which would deny the vast majority of consumers the opportunity to enjoy this superb and sustainably caught seafood, leaving the availability of scallops to only a rich elite,” Armstrong wrote.
