Less power to the EU Council, and more power to the Commission and the Member States, two Swedish government agencies recommend in a joint report to the cabinet.
The Board of Fisheries and the Environmental Protection Agency were asked by the government to evaluate the current Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and make recommendations as for how it may be improved when a new CFP is to be enforced in 2012.
“The current policy has failed to prevent overfishing, insufficient profitability for the fisheries and stocks threatening to fail”, said Axel Wenblad, Director General of the Board of Fisheries. “We are now facing a new program period, and we have the chance to make radical improvements”.
The Board noted that the Commission presented a Green Paper on the CFP and the CFP reform earlier this spring, and pointed out that the government intends to see that the issue will be widely discussed during the Swedish EU Presidency over the second half of this year.
The report listed nine areas where the CFP should be changed for the better:
- Clear guidelines for how priorities will be set when the safeguarding of certain stocks is in conflict with other political goals. Priorities should be decided from the ecosystem approach.
- Power to be moved from the Council to the Commission and the Member States. “Presently, too many decisions are made on the highest political level”, the report says.
- Scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) should be more comprehensive, for longer time periods, and in a less complicated language. The report notes that ICES lacks “socio-economic competence” – a body of economists, similar to ICES, should be set up to provide politicians with such advice.
- A change in distribution of fishing rights to fishermen and groups of fishermen, in order to encourage and favour more responsible fisheries.
- Reduced fleet capacity.
- More efficient control measures, with rules that can be more easily understood and obeyed by fishermen and followed up by Member States.
- A transition from management by catch quotas to management by regulating fishing effort.
- The Union’s “foreign policy” in the fisheries field should be better structured and fairer to external parties such as developing nations. As for the bilateral agreements between the EU and these countries, seen by many critics as disadvantageous to these poorer nations, the report claims that the Swedish position has contributed to “considerable improvements” in them, although much remains to be done.
- Aquaculture should be better integrated into the Union’s general fisheries policies.
“Most important of all”, Wenblad added, “is that all management should be based on the ecosystem approach. Management can not be handled species by species. We have to look at the ecosystem as a whole”.