A joint NGO response to the General Approach, which was agreed to by a majority of Member States at the June Council, has called on MEPs to reject their approach for the CFP reform and “fix Europe’s broken fisheries policy”.
It became clear during the seminar this Thursday that the Race to Save the Baltic is a matter of time. For fishery management, result on the fish stock can often be seen within five years after political decisions and actions have been carried out. For eutrophication and agricultural matters on the other hand, the timeframe between when a political decision has been made to when the results can be seen in the Baltic Sea can take as long as 20-30 years.
On 24-25 May, a seminar on how to develop more selective gears in the Baltic demersal trawl fishery was held in Karlskrona, Sweden. The seminar was hosted by the EU funded LOT 1 project which aims to develop more selective trawls through collaboration between fishermen and scientists.
In their new video, “for or against fish?”, WWF Sweden call on the European Parliament to end overfishing and solve the problem of discarding when they vote in plenary on the CFP reform Basic Regulation in November.
On 8 June, to coincide with World Oceans Day, the coalition OCEAN2012 launched their annual European Fish Weeks campaign. This year’s theme is a call to “End Overfishing”.
The General Approach, which provides the Council with an orientation position on key issues in the CFP reform but has no legal standing, has been published.
Early this morning, the EU Fisheries Council came to an agreement on a General Approach to the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. Some countries voted against the heavily watered down compromise, but not sufficient to block an agreement.
The Commissioner argued that none of the endemic failings of the CFP: overfishing, overcapacity and discarding, will not be solved by the General Approach that has been proposed by the Danish Presidency.
On 31 May, ICES’ Advisory Committee (ACOM) published their advice regarding the exploitation of the Baltic Sea fish stocks for 2013. The attachment provides a summary and comment from FISH on the assessments and advice.
At a presentation given to the Swedish Green Party congress, Isabella Lövin (Greens/EFA, Sweden) discussed international issues such as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing and Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs).