The main demand in a joint letter on harmful subsidies from three environment NGOs was included all but verbatim in the conclusions from the October Council meeting of the EU Environment ministers.
The letter to the EU Environment attachés from the WWF, BirdLife International and OCEAN2012, a coalition promoting more sustainable fisheries in the Union where FISH was one of the founding members, called for the European Commission to “present, as a matter of urgency, a roadmap for the reform, sector by sector, of subsidies that have environmentally harmful effects with the aim of their removal”.
The wording in the Council conclusions was an invitation to the Commission to “review, as a matter of urgency, sector by sector, subsidies that have considerable negative effects on the environment and are incompatible with sustainable development, with a view to gradually eliminating them, in line with the EU SDS and the recent G20 call in that regard”.
The letter to the attachés had mentioned some of the subsidies to the fishing sectors as particularly controversial, pointing out that the Commission’s own Green Book on the CFP reform published last April stated that public financial support “often contradicts with CFP objectives, in particular the need to reduce overcapacity (…) which has resulted in a situation where more than 80 percent of assessed EU fish stocks are overfished and 30 percent are outside safe biological limits”.
The removal of environmentally harmful subsidies is one of the key milestones on the road to sustainable development in the EU, as well as the effective reform of the CFP, the letter stressed.