Forty-five vessels, equalling one third of the total Swedish capacity for fishing cod in the western waters, have applied for subsidies to scrap the boats.
Three quarters of the money for the program, aimed at a 50-percent reduction in Sweden’s capacity to catch cod in the Kattegat, the Skagerrak and the North Sea by 2015, comes from the European Union.
The 45 applications filed totalled almost €25 million, slightly more than has been allotted, which means that the Board of Fisheries now will decide which ones will be granted, with the general goal of attaining the biggest possible capacity reduction at the lowest possible cost. Vessels with permits to fish the Kattegat, where the state of the cod stock is worst, will have highest priority.
Applications for scrapping subsidies varied between €66,000-21.5 millions, and included vessels built between 1955-1999.
A similar campaign last year aimed at fisheries in the Baltic resulted in six trawler owners being granted 4.9 million Euros in subsidies for scrapping their vessels, enabling Sweden almost in one strike to live up to its national goal of reducing the fleet trawling for cod in thjose waters by ten percent by 2010.
In another EU member nation, the UK, a fishermen spokesman has recently declared that up to 20 percent of his colleagues on the British west coast would welcome a similar scheme to scrap their boats and leave the business.