The breakdown in negotiations EU-Norway will mean that 2010 TACs set at the upcoming December Council meeting will be for EU vessels only, while the total outtake will be subject to a likely agreement next year.
Catch quotas for 2010 are to be set for a large number of stocks at the meeting, the last under the Presidency of Sweden’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Eskil Erlandsson. Spain, with the Union’s biggest fishing fleet, will take over the Presidency on January 1.
In earlier years, the December Council has been able to decide catch quotas based on an agreement already reached with Norway on how to distribute catches between those two parties.
One week before this year’s meeting, however, it was announced that those talks had collapsed, with mackerel being the main sticking-point. EU and Norway also failed to reach agreement on quotas for cod, haddock, herring and plaice in the North Sea and the Skagerrak, and Norway complained that EU would not address the problem of discards (Norway has a total ban against discards).
Prior to the meeting, FISH and its partner in the SARFISH project, Seas at Risk in Brussels, sent out its third letter to Ministers, advisors, EU officials and other stakeholders describing an NGO stand on the agenda points.