Fisheries issues will dominate as the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Ministers meet in Brussels Thursday and Friday.
The main item at the Council meeting will be 2009 catch quotas and permitted levels of fishing activities for the main commercial stocks in EU waters of the North-East Atlantic. Total Allowable Catches (TAC’s) and quotas for the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and for the deep sea stocks have been settled earlier this fall.
The EU Commission presented a proposal in November that was based on both scientific advice and the Commission’s own general guidelines in a earlier policy statement published in May. That statement advocated in general a shift from a TAC/quota system to an effort management system, the effort expressed in kilowatt-days.
The Commission’s current proposal will now be objected to a reworking overnight, a compromise hopefully to be adopted Friday, Swedish Government sources said.
Although still at very low levels in most areas, the Commission said in a pre-meeting statement that cod in the North Sea had benefited from the good 2005 intake of young fish, permitting a small increase in TAC’s to be proposed in agreement with Norway. The Commission also pointed to growing stocks of both northern and southern hake as examples of beneficial long-term planning.
For many other stocks, however, the situation is much more dire, and the Commission described the herring as being in “extremely poor condition” in many areas. The scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) had recommended no catches at all in that case, the Commission now however proposing a 25 per cent decrease (20 per cent for the West Scotland stock).
As for spurdog and porbeagle – deep sea sharks – and skates and rays, the Commission referred to similar problems, and proposed a zero catch for the sharks and tough limitations in the case of skates and rays.
The marine conservation organization Oceana welcomed those measures, noting in a press release that it was the first time it supported a Commission proposal on sharks and rays. The organization called on the ministers to accept the proposal, and warned against “any attempts to weaken them, like so called “bycatch TACs” or derogations from EU level rules for some member states to protect their national fishing industry interests”.