Commercial fisherman should not be compared withn farmers.
Farmers are subsadised not to grow crops and set the fields aside for the wild life.
Fisherman used to be subsadised but this was stopped and origanly the govement gave them their lisences. The lisences are now worth money, and are bought and sold by fisherman.
There has to be real efforts to conserve our fisheries, this is not for commercial fisherman but for anglers. The reason for this is as mentioned before angling is worth far more to the UK econemy than commercial fishing.
Having said that we can still have a small well managed substainable commercial fishery if hard decisions are made soon.
Shutting off estuaries to commercial fishermen, increasing mesh size, are both direction we should be heading.
There is one commercial fisherman at Bradwell, he fills the gaps in the fishing with other work to make a liveing. He conciders his first job as fishing, although he has down sized from a 35 footer to a 26 footer in the last five years.
5 stone of bass is a good day around 35 fish.
There are a new generation of fisherman at Mersea.The days when son followed father into fishing are still in excistance. But instead of working on the larger boats with their fathers
they are buying small fast boat. These boat get to the inshore marks in minutes. They only go out at the right state of tide, and only use around 1000 yards of gear.The whole proses is normally over in 3 hours.
This sort of fishing should be pushed further ofshore alowing the inshore marks to develop.
This must be best for all concerned in the long run.