Insights from our Fisheries Project Lead, Lia ní Aodha

21st November 2025

Today is World Fisheries Day – a day to highlight sustainable fisheries and fishing livelihoods, and spotlight their role in terms of food security and sovereignty, supporting communities and preserving biodiversity.

It was first celebrated in 1997 when, bringing together representatives from more than 26 countries, the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers convened in New Delhi, India. The day explicitly includes both wild capture fisheries and aquaculture.

Not to diminish the role of one over the other, but bounds need to be drawn somewhere, and betraying my bias (though notwithstanding time spent knee deep in cold water turning bags on trestles and grading oysters as a child) this blog is all about wild capture fisheries.

Around the world, millions of people rely on fisheries as a source of essential, hard-to-find elsewhere, nutrients. A key form of animal protein for many, particularly along the coast, fisheries also provide livelihoods and incomes, and produce a highly traded commodity.

Why does this matter to the UK? As an island nation, and by virtue of the strong tides and nutrient mixing that goes on along the large shallow shelf off our coasts, the UK is surrounded by some of the most productive and diverse waters in the North East Atlantic.

Deeply intertwined with our heritage, fishing offers livelihoods at sea and onshore. It contributes to local economies, and provides healthy food for populations – albeit often beyond our shores. Paradoxically, most of what we produce from the sea is exported, and most of what we consume is produced on land or imported.

Though Brexit never brought the windfall it promised fisheries, and the sector faces several potentially existential challenges, UK fishing and its low-carbon product holds nets of potential. This potential extends to our food system, health, and efforts to address climate change and tackle biodiversity challenges.

A key question for the sector, however, is whether this potential can be realised. From the latest deal on fisheries with the EU to the Government’s Immigration White Paper and Marine Protected Area designs, announcements over the past twelve months haven’t helped.

For the most part – as a sector which is more often than not framed quite publicly as destructive rather than productive… as something to be curtailed rather than strategised… and as an activity which is quite removed from the bulk of the UK’s population – getting fishing on anything but a management agenda has been difficult.

But what if we were to look to the sea and its potential, and grasp the full scale of benefits this sector could offer? And what if we were to plan for the sector accordingly?

These are precisely the questions the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Fisheries – the cross-party group of MPs and peers which collaborate within Parliament to promote and support diverse UK fisheries – seeks to answer and address with its recently announced National Fisheries Action Plan.

Making a clear case for development of a coherent, cross-departmental strategy for the sector, the high level co-created plan will map the UK’s fishing and seafood industry and its value. In addition, it will outline key priority areas for action in support of a vibrant, diverse industry, and set out recommendations to address the key challenges it faces.

One of Mindfully Wired’s flagship projects, acting as Secretariat to the APPG with funding from the Fishmonger’s Company, we support the Group’s activities by organising and facilitating seminars and meetings, and researching key sector issues and policy developments.

Based on this work, we know that the sector is working hard to address sustainability challenges. If supported by sound policy, the fishing sector could be a cornerstone of a robust and resilient food supply for our communities here at home. It could contribute to the health of our nation, and it could contribute to meeting our economic and environmental goals.

For this to happen, however, the sector needs support. Part of that will need to come in the form of a holistic strategy for the sector, that explicitly recognises it as an economic food-producing sector, vital to our fishing communities for sure – but with so much potential to offer our communities more generally.

On this World Fisheries Day, alongside all those working hard across the fishing sector to produce high-quality seafood, we are celebrating the commitment of the APPG to developing a plan for the sector that could contribute to such a strategy.

And who knows – maybe in ten years none of us will think that John Dory is a famous poet, we’ll happily eat fish without breadcrumbs, our fishing communities will be more resilient, and our food system will be a lot more blue…