The STECF, an expert body under the EU Commission, has sharply rejected an official assessment of the social and economic impacts of a future management plan for pelagic fisheries in the Baltic Sea, as lacking in both method and transparency.
The Commission has started preparations for a management plan for the pelagic stocks in the Baltic Sea. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has provided scientific advice on management targets and harvest rules, and the MRAG consulting firm has assessed the possible economic and social impacts under different scenarios.
Following those assessments, the Commission had asked its Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) to review them and leave comments.
In the report from its Autumn Plenary Meeting, STECF by en large agrees with the ICES advice, but said it could not endorse the conclusions drawn in the report from MRAG, a London-based commercial consulting firm.
Noting that the report “is presented as a commercial consulting report to a client, rather than as a scientific paper or working group report”, STECF said it was concerned that the use of some data without detailed knowledge of individual fisheries “may lead to false conclusions”, and pointed at “several errors” in the descriptive part.
The STECF report further remarked that the market situation for both herring and sprat in the Baltic has changed considerably since the 1990s, which has not been sufficiently highlighted by MRAG.
“As the market is highly unstable and the future has not been properly considered, the results of the impact assessment are not as credible as they could be”, STECF wrote.
“STECF notes that the MRAG impact assessment report is insufficiently transparent to allow an assessment of the robustness of data collected, data used, models applied, and conclusions drawn. Therefore, STECF can not endorse the conclusions drawn”, it stated.