Why mackerel has been taken off the menu In fact, the crisis has long been brewing - and, in retrospect, fisheries campaigners seem to have been over-sanguine. It began more than four years ago, when Iceland started increasing its landings of the fish, unilaterally upping its quota from 2,000 tonnes in 2008 to 146,000 tonnes last year. The Faroe Islands followed suit, raising their own quota sixfold to 150,000 tons. They did so because for some reason (climate change has been blamed) mackerel have been moving northwards. There are now plenty of them in those warming waters, so the locals insist they have every right to harvest them. Negotiations have so far failed, and, in the absence of agreement, the EU and Norway last week cut their quotas by 15 per cent to try to relieve the pressure. And two weeks ago, Richard Benyon, the fisheries minister, told Parliament that EU trade sanctions against Iceland and the Faroes were now "on the table." These could be in operation by the summer, when new quotas are due to be set, directed at imports of mackerel and fishmeal to feed farmed salmon. But - as the former Daily Telegraph writer turned fisheries campaigner, Charles Clover, points out - a "mackerel war" might backfire, since much of the Icelandic and Faroese catch is landed, and processed, in Britain. Last March the Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies fisheries, suspended its seal of approval for north-east Atlantic mackerel, and later last year Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op all boycotted it. So its downgrading on the "fish to eat" list - the Marine Conservation Society says it should now be only consumed "occasionally" - has long been on its way. The saga is just one episode in an astonishing depletion of the once-rich fisheries around our shores. Prof Callum Roberts, of the University of York, has calculated that as late as 1889 British waters held up to 15 times as many cod, haddock and halibut as today. The devastation long preceded the Common Fisheries Policy, but it has made things worse: more than two thirds of the quotas it set over the past 25 years have exceeded official scientific advice. A minister once told me that the meetings in Brussels were like "Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp arguing over who should shoot the last buffalo." To its credit, the Government, led by Mr Benyon, has tried to change this. Largely because of its pressure, serious reform seems finally to be under way, with EU ministers and a European parliamentary committee last year agreeing to ban the grossly wasteful practice of "discarding," dead or dying, nearly one in every 10 fish caught, while the MEPs also voted to stop the setting of quotas above scientific recommendations. In the meantime the Marine Conservation Society suggests eating herring and sardine instead of mackerel; it also gives the green light to whiting from the Celtic Sea, coley from the North Sea and Dover sole from the English Channel. Bon appétit.