An Unraveling Safety Net : Baltic Fishing Fleet Feels Pain of a Europe Long Divided by Communism

For fisherman Roland Evert, the numbers simply no longer add up.

For the 33 others who are also part of the small Baltic fishing fleet that sails from this timeless little island, the picture isn’t much different.

The price of herring has dropped so low that the catches don’t even cover costs. No one wants the flounder they bring in, and the European Community quota on cod is so tight that they will have landed their year’s share by the end of this month.

Talking over mugs of steaming coffee in the eastern German fleet’s cramped quayside office one recent morning, those present pondered the many “ifs” that suddenly dominate their lives--if the cod quota is relaxed . . . if the flood of cheap imported fish from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia can be stopped . . . if they can get government support or at least debt relief on the loans they took out to upgrade their boats.

“I can’t ever remember it being this bad,” said Evert. “Each year it’s a bit worse.”

A few miles east on the larger island of Ruegen, fishing boat captains in the Baltic port of Sassnitz deliver a harsher verdict. “Basically, it’s over for us,” declared Wolfgang Stremow, who first began fishing the Baltic out of Sassnitz 42 years ago. “Last year, we had a good May and a good June with the cod and that kept us alive, but now. . . .”

While conditions are a far cry from the salad days of the Communist era--when diesel fuel was 22 cents a gallon, fish prices were fixed high and income was certain--the story of eastern Germany’s small Baltic fishing fleet is about more than just another Eastern industry collapsing under the brunt of unification and Western-style competition.

It is, in part, a story about the pain of trying to knit together a Europe too long divided.

As they adjust to Western-style costs, local fishermen claim that Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian trawlers are undermining the market by dumping their catches in German or Danish ports, often for a fraction of already depressed local prices.

But at another level, the story of Hiddensee and the eastern German Baltic fishing fleet is also about the problems of honest, hard-working people trying to overcome the insecurities of a world turned upside-down and a mind-set shaped by more than four decades of authoritarian rule.

With back-breaking days that run from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., no one could dismiss these men as shirkers who don’t know the real meaning of work.

In many ways, the problems of Hiddensee’s fishermen are nothing more and nothing less than those shared by millions of other East Europeans struggling to shake off no-risk, Soviet-style thinking and adjust to the rough-and-tumble realities of free-market democracy.

The extent to which they succeed will say much about the continent’s economic future.

Dealing with such change is especially tough on an island where locals have so successfully resisted modernity that the automobile is still banned.

Norbert Ahting--a West German administrator lent to the is land’s tiny local government after the Berlin Wall fell and who was elected mayor in mid-1990--admitted that he had totally underestimated the difficulty of introducing new ideas. He believes the local fishing fleet can survive, but worries it might not.

“It could be they (the fishermen) are so inflexible that they will kill themselves off,” he said.

The fleet has already shrunk from 21 to seven boats during the last three years.

Ahting said the island’s fishing cooperative has consistently rejected his pleas that the members of the fleet clean and filet their catch, then ship it themselves to the major wholesale markets in Hamburg or Berlin--steps that would add value to their product and earn the fishermen more money. They have also rejected the idea of providing fish ready to eat to the sprinkling of hotels on the island that today forms the nucleus of a budding tourism industry.

“They have no idea of marketing and they don’t seem interested in learning,” he said. “They insist it’s not their job.”

Ahting says the problem lies, in part, in the islanders’ inherent suspicion of outsiders and of their ideas. As a native of the western

German island of Helgoland in the North Sea, he knows such insular thinking well. But he argues that on Hiddensee, there is an added twist.

“It’s a question of upbringing,” he said. “Forty years of socialism has left its mark.”

One island hotel operator, for example, recalled that after seeing the menu price for fresh cod was four times what they were paid for it, local fishermen suddenly jacked up their prices to island outlets--a move that promptly took them out of their home market. “They had no idea of what went into putting that meal in front of a customer,” the hotelier said.

But for Ahting, the crowning blow came last summer, when the cooperative refused a request to deliver fresh fish to a restaurant barely 300 yards from the wharf, insisting instead that the restaurant send someone to get the catch.

“The restaurant had no one to spare, so they phoned an outfit in Hamburg (120 miles away), which delivered the fish to their door,” he said.

In Sassnitz, Eckhart Naumann, another mayor transplanted from the West, talked of similar resistance but voiced understanding. “Responsibility and initiative are tough to learn,” he said.

Such difficulties place the Baltic fleet at a special disadvantage in dealing with the double-barreled crisis of shrinking catches and dropping prices faced by many European Community fishing fleets.

In part, it is a crisis driven by the arrival of low-cost, low-priced imports from other Eastern European fleets trying to tap into the lucrative Western markets. EC fishermen have screamed foul at the dumping prices, much as the community’s carefully protected agricultural producers have done, but so far with limited success.

At the same time, frustrated Eastern European producers accuse the community of blocking market access.

“The EC can only intervene when dumping is involved, and that’s hard to prove,” said Brar Roeloffs, a state secretary in the eastern German state government of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

A free-trade agreement signed last year between the EC and the European Free Trade Assn. has also brought more competition from Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic fleets.

The fleets from Hiddensee and Sassnitz have participated in a recent weeklong protest strike, while fishermen from Kiel, Travemunde and other Western ports have blocked trucks carrying Norwegian and Swedish fish from Baltic ferry ships. The fishermen want sharp restrictions on imports, an easing of tight EC quotas on cod and new subsidies to bring them through the hard times.

While it appears that new government money will come, officials speak only of short-term “bridging” funds.

“We’ve got an interest in keeping these fleets,” said Roeloffs. “It’s jobs and it’s part of the region’s identity. But we can’t pay subsidies forever.”