22/12/21 - Puffin wrecks, Norwegian cod quotas and honey mead

Farming Today

• Episode: 22/12/21 - Puffin wrecks, Norwegian cod quotas and honey mead
• Website: Farming Today
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj8q/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:13:32
• Published: 2021-12-22 07:00

Dead and dying puffins have been washing up on beaches from Shetland down to the North East of England. Puffins are on the RSPB’s red list of birds with the highest conservation priority and this kind of mortality rate is highly unusual for this time of year. The UK and Norway have agreed a new deal for fishing in each other’s waters in 2022. This year there's been no deal. The new agreement will see UK boats and Norwegian boats both able to catch up to 30 thousand tonnes of white fish in each others’ waters. There’s an additional UK quota for 500 tonnes of cod - that means that in total UK boats can catch more than 7000 tonnes of cod in the Arctic, because of a separate allocation of the fish around Svalbard. The government says it will provide fishing opportunities that will benefit both the fishing industry and the protection of the marine environment. But Jane Sandell from UK Fisheries, which owns the Kirkella, a huge Hull based trawler with a hundred strong crew, says the cod quota the Government has negotiated is paltry. And mead is a festive tipple but the market for this ancient honey-based drink is growing and not just at this time of year. In the US there’s a mead renaissance - the American Mead Makers Association says hundreds of craft producers have set up business over the last two decades. We meet a mead maker in Wales, who’s hoping that trend will spread. Presented by Caz Graham Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Heather Simons