The EU and Norway have finally struck a deal on 2010 TACs after lengthy negotiations, with Scotland, seeing itself as hardest-pressed EU member, expressing mixed reactions.
The major dividing point when those annual negotiations collapsed last December was the interpretation of a 1994 mackerel agreement, where the EU had stopped Norwegian vessels from catching that fish in EU waters.
The EU and Norway now reached “a crucial long-term agreement on mackerel management in the North-East Atlantic, which provides both for stable quota shares and for agreed access arrangements for their respective fleets over a ten-year period”, according to a Commission press release.
According to that deal, Union and Norwegian vessels will now have wider access to their respective waters, although the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) for mackerel will be decreased this year.
TACs for cod were raised by 16.5 percent in the North Sea – a controversial decision in line with the Council’s December TAC set for the EU part – while TACs were cut for haddock and whiting.
With 66 per cent of the landings into the UK, Scotland is one of the major fisheries powers in the EU, and as for Norway its oil sector just in recent years passed fisheries as that nation’s top source of income.
Scotland’s Fisheries Secretary Richard Lochhead now gave the EU-Norway agreement a cautious welcome, saying it was the “best possible deal for Scottish fishermen”.
He admitted, however, that some measures designed to protect vulnerable fish stocks would be “unwelcome” among parts of the fleet.
Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, expressed similar reserved satisfaction, noting that “normally settled on an annual basis the new agreement will cover a 10-year period, reviewed after five years. This will give some needed certainty to the fishery”. “Not every detail will suit everyone; such is the complexity of the nature of the arrangements”, he added.