An inconvenient truth

09 December 2013

 

By Prof. Les Watling, Prof. Callum Roberts and Prof. J. Murray Roberts

 

Fishing industry lobbyists recently circulated a document in which they made 10 points (“10 Facts on Deep Sea Fishing – all you need to know…”), each of them designed to persuade MEPs that deep sea bottom trawling is a benign and productive activity. However, the document is full of misrepresentations which together present a highly distorted view of the industry and its impacts. Here we present an objective appraisal of the scientific basis for the ‘facts’ in this document. Far from being ‘facts’, most are simply claims that fall apart on closer scrutiny. We summarise the ten points below, and append a more detailed response later in this document.

 

Read the whole report on the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition website