ENVIRONMENT: EU Troubling Fishy Waters

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Oct 4 2007 (IPS) - European Union governments routinely ignore scientific advice when they establish catch limits for their fishermen, a leading environmental group has suggested.

Each December, the EU’s fisheries ministers meet in Brussels to decide the catch thresholds for the following year. Usually, their decisions are preceded by fierce haggling that runs into the early hours of the morning.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has found that the catch limits they finally agree on can be up to 57 percent higher than those recommended by scientists.

In a report published Oct. 4, WWF says that although four-fifths of the Union’s fish stocks have been overexploited to an extent that their future may not be safe, the key EU bodies are not exercising adequate caution.

Its study criticises both governments in the 27-country bloc and its executive, the European Commission, which is tasked with proposing total allowable catches (TACs).

The limits for this year, agreed by governments, were nearly 54 percent above those proposed by the Commission, WWF says.

Yet it also finds that most of the catch limits put forward by the Commission for the North Sea and Celtic Sea regions in 2006-07 were higher than those recommended by scientists at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

EU marine law is currently subject to 370 different regulations and decisions, banded together in a 10-year Common Fisheries Policy that lasts until 2012.

“I would invite fisheries ministers to look at the rules they have agreed and to apply them,” said Aaron McLouglin, a WWF campaigner.

“If you choose to ignore them, you get bad results,” he told IPS. “It’s like how you avoid people speeding on the roads. You follow the rules and – guess what? – less people get killed.”

The report follows an announcement made by the Commission last month that it has opened legal proceedings against seven EU countries involved in fishing for bluefin tuna in the East Atlantic and Mediterranean.

France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Portugal and Spain are accused of not honouring an obligation to send accurate catch data to the Commission’s Brussels headquarters.

Stocks of bluefin tuna are depleted due to years of over-fishing, much of which is undeclared, the Commission said.

The WWF report complained, too, that as much as 60 percent of fish in the Union’s waters is simply thrown back into the sea. As most of that fish is dead when it hits the water, discards are considered to be anathema to conservation efforts.

Earlier this year, the Commission presented a policy paper on ending discards, but it has not yet come forward with legislation. Joe Borg, the European commissioner for fisheries, has described such high levels of discards as “unethical”.

A separate paper drawn up in the European Parliament cites estimates that worldwide discards range from 7 million to 27 million tonnes per annum – or the equivalent of one-quarter of all fish and other species that end up in fishermen’s nets.

Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter said that the Union’s fisheries policy is “counterproductive”.

To ensure that they do not exceed catch limits, fishermen have no option but to rid themselves of vast quantities of fish. “On the other hand, the only attempts to reduce this waste rely on micro-managing fishing gear and practices, which is almost guaranteed to provoke the industry into finding ways to subvert those regulations,” Schlyter added. “The time for a new approach is here.”

He advocates that fishermen who use a sorting grid designed to minimise the catching of unwanted fish should be allowed more days at sea than vessels that do not. An incentive system of that nature has already been introduced for lobster fisheries.

Guy Vernaeve, spokesman for the fishing industry lobby group Europêche, argued that some fish stocks have improved due to good management. “We must be balanced on this issue,” he added. “It’s not so simple that you can say that everything is the fault of fishermen. There are other factors like climate change and pollution.”

In June, the Commission said that long-term management plans had had a positive impact on stocks of mackerel, North Sea haddock and sole in the Bay of Biscay (between France and Spain).

But the Commission also noted that just three out of 33 EU fish stocks for which their status is known are being exploited in accordance with the conservation clauses in an accord reached at the 2002 United Nations summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg.

Greenpeace marine specialist Saskia Richartz believes that a fundamental rethink of the EU’s fisheries policy is required so that governments are no longer fixated by pleasing fishermen’s representatives in their home countries when they set catch limits. Responsibility for quotas should be transferred from fisheries to environment ministers, she argued, while rules should be introduced so that no threshold will be higher than that advised by scientists.

“Most natural resources are managed as part of environmental policy, not commercial policy,” she told IPS. “We really have to move away in the medium to long-term from seeing fish as an economic resource.”