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Greenpeace’s inflatable fishing boat takes over the city Centre in Gdansk, Poland, in a call for Poland and the EU to take action and support a sustainable CFP reform.

In their evaluation of national efforts during 2010 to achieve a sustainable balance between fishing capacity and fishing opportunities, based on reports submitted by Member States, the Commission concluded that “it will be difficult to eliminate overcapacity in the short term if no changes are made to the current policy”.

The CFP reform, with a focus on regonalisation and discards were the priorities during the 11th Polish Fisheries Roundtable meeting.

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.