The Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) has been awarded the prestigious 2009 Swedish Baltic Sea Water Award. The award-giving body, The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), cited HELCOM for having taken “marine environmental protection to a new level”. HELCOM , the governing body of the 1974 and 1992 Helsinki Conventions, works to protect the marine environment of … Continued
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, … Continued
Chelsea Football Club is one of 6,500 customers to face removed Atlantic cod and swordfish from their lunchroom menus, as the world’s largest contract caterer decides to follow conservationists’ recommendations. The Compass Group, which caters to schools, workplaces and restaurants all over the UK and Ireland, along with the Bristol Zoo, had already banned bluefish … Continued
A study released by a Canadian NGO implies that the unregulated ITQ market in British Columbia favours “armchair” fishermen and investors, rather than actual, sea-faring entrepreneurs. The majority of fisheries in British Columbia on the Canadian Pacific Coast have been managed under a system of Individually Transferable Quotas (ITQs) since the early 1990s. The federal … Continued
A global study holds forth the US, New Zealand and Iceland as good fish stock managers, but adds that more than half of the assessed stocks worldwide still need rebuilding. The study, published in July in the Science magazine, is a joint effort that includes Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Canada, a controversial marine … Continued
Because of new project funding and a shifting of responsibilities within the Fisheries Secretariat, we are now searching for a new member of staff. FISH is looking to recruit a new team member to assist with our ongoing policy work. The successful candidate will take part in our work on “greening” international fisheries policy, with … Continued
Many doubts were vented over the process leading to the setting of TACs as the Commission arranged a one-day July seminar for scientists, bureaucrats, stakeholders and politicians in Brussels. After presentations by scientists of assessment methods and states of stocks in EU waters region by region, discussions continued, dominated by industry representatives claiming that scientific … Continued
A Canadian fisheries workers trade union is protesting that their government is not answering to hopeful signs of recovery for the earlier collapsed cod stock off Labrador and Newfoundland. The cod stocks off Eastern Canada and Northeastern USA, formerly some of the world’s biggest, collapsed in the early 1990’s and showed few signs of recovery … Continued
Carmen Fraga Estévez of Spain returned as chairperson of the Fisheries Committee in the European Parliament for the next two-and-a-half years. Ms. Fraga Estévez, a MP for the Partido Popular since 1994, held the chair between 1997-99, and was Secretary-General for Maritime Fisheries 2002-2004. The elected vice chairs were Struan Stevenson of the United Kingdom, … Continued
EU member states are not fulfilling their obligations to report on the reduction of fleet overcapacity in fisheries, and the Commission is not doing enough to enforce those obligations, a recent study shows. The evaluation by the independent Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), for the Pew Environment group, is based on the 2007 member … Continued