George Monbiot, blaðamaðurinn og umhverfisverndarsinninn frægi, skrifar í Guardian um fiskveiðistefnu Evrópusambandsins – sem hann tekur að hafi stappað nærri geðveiki – og stríðið um makrílstofnana í Norðurhöfum. Monbiot telur að rétt sé að nota meiri makríl til manneldis og hann fer ófögrum orðum um veiðar Íslendinga, en hafa sett stóran hluta af makrílnum í bræðslu:

„The new mackerel fisheries are finding markets far beyond Channel 4’s audience. Jogvan Jespersen of the Faroese Pelagic Organisation told me most of the fish his members catch are sold to Nigeria and eastern Europe. There’s nothing wrong with this: the Nigerians have as much right to eat fish as we do. Jespersen says the Faroese catch is being sold only for human consumption.

Iceland’s industry is another matter. The chart its fisheries ministry sent me shows that over one-third of the mackerel that ships in its waters caught last year weren’t fed to people at all. Instead they were turned into fishmeal, which is sold to feed chickens, pigs, other fish and pets and – even worse – to fertilise crops. It’s a disgusting, astonishing waste. Already that country has more or less wiped out its blue whiting stocks and killed huge volumes of herring and capelin for the same purpose.

But the government’s website tells us something else of interest: that most of the fishmeal and fish oil Iceland sells is bought by Norway and the European Union: the very parties complaining about Iceland’s plunder. Any nation which really cared about fish stocks would ban both the production and consumption of meal and oil, except from the waste produced by fish processing factories. A basic principle of marine conservation is that fish should be caught only for human consumption.“