Today, a proposal from the European Commission to adjust the current regulation on shark finning was debated in Council. The changes put an end to derogations from the current shark finning ban which allows some vessels to remove fins onboard and it was agreed that the Council supports this.
At the Fisheries Council meeting today, Commissioner Damanaki made clear that the Commission is willing to listen to the Member States and revise its approach to the EU discard ban, moving from a species approach to a fishery-based approach.
Due to overfishing of horse mackerel, blue whiting and monkfish in Galicia, the European Commission has fined the Spanish government and cut their quotas for 2012.
A recent study published in the journal Science has challenged the concept of selective fishing as an efficient way to maximise the harvest of fish stocks in a sustainable way. It may be questioned, however, to what degree these results are valid and applicable for modern large-scale fisheries.
On Friday, March 30, Fish Fight will launch its Europe-wide discards ban campaign in Poland. The event will take place in front of the Polish Parliament (Sejm), and will be led by a Polish celebrity chef, Robert Makłowicz. According to Fish Fight, up to 15% of all fish caught in the Baltic Sea is discarded.
The new economics foundation (nef) recently launched their report, entitled “Jobs lost at sea”. They investigated the economic effects of overfishing and analysed its impact on employment in the EU. In the study they took 43 fish stocks in European and neighbouring waters and looked at the what the effects of managing at the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) would be in terms of additional revenue and jobs. They found that over €3 billion is lost every year due to overfishing these stocks, which could support 100,000 jobs in the industry.
In a presentation to national parliamentarians in the European Parliament, Struan Stevenson (ECR/UK) outlined his position on the reform of the Common Market Organisation (CMO), for which he is the Fisheries Committee rapporteur. Stevenson stated that his report will feature suggestions on how to reform the role of POs in fisheries management, comments on the proposed storage mechanism, as well as amendments on the consumer information provided on fish products.
On 23rd April, the Fish Fight campaign against discards will launch in Germany with an event outside the Bundestag. A series of programmes will then be broadcast on television, highlighting the wasteful fishing practices which have led to half of all the fish caught in the North Sea being thrown back dead into the sea.
In early March this year, a group of fisheries scientists, representatives from the Baltic Sea RAC and policy makers gathered in Charlottenlund, Denmark to discuss the possibilities of instituting multispecies (ecosystems approach) based advice for the Baltic. The current workshop (WKMULTBAL) was a follow up meeting to a workshop held at ICES headquarters in December last year.
A recent documentary by Joakim Odelberg (in co-operation with Emma Watson and Peter Isaksson), funded by the BalticSea2020, strikingly illustrates the severe but often neglected problem of ghost nets in the Baltic Sea.