A conciliatory mood over fisheries issues as Iceland entered memberships talks with the EU in late July was dispersed just two weeks later in a conflict over moving mackerel stocks.
After Iceland and the Faeroe Islands have increased their mackerel TACs in the wake of stocks moving in from EU domains due to warming waters, Commissioner Maria Damanaki warned that their vessels may be blocked from access to Union waters.
The Faeroe Islands are an autonomous part of Denmark, but not member of the EU.
When the Union opened membership talks with Iceland in the last week in July, Iceland’s foreign minister Ossur Skarphedinson made it clear that fisheries issues would be off-limits in the negotiations.
He insisted that fisheries should be a “specific management area” since the EU’s common fisheries policy has failed to prevent “endemic overfishing” elsewhere.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele, seated next to Skarphedinson at a news conference, said the EU grants no “permanent” exemptions, suggesting a temporary one was not out of the question.
Skarphedinson added that the Icelandic fishing sector had remained sustainable while overfishing has become a dominating problem elsewhere in Europe.
Fish products account for half of Iceland’s exports and the per capita income from fishing in Iceland is 100 times higher than the EU average.
That tone of understanding was however dispersed recently, as Damanaki vented the Union’s “grave concern” at the “unilateral” and “surprise” move from the Faeroe Islands on 9 August to follow suit with Iceland and extend its mackerel catch limits.
“This escalating trend, whereby unjustifiably high mackerel fishing quotas had been set firstly by Iceland and now by Faeroe Islands for 2010, is in clear contradiction with the avowed objective of sustainable fisheries,” she said in a statement, adding that “such actions risk causing the collapse of the northeast Atlantic mackerel stock, which would be to the detriment of all the fleets and industries concerned.”
“Should our efforts (to reach an agreement) not be fruitful, however, I cannot guarantee that we will continue to exchange fishing possibilities with Iceland and the Faroe Islands in 2011”, she warned.
Icelandic sector representatives immediately responded that their unilateral TAC increase was a consequence of the EU and Norway excluding Iceland from integrated mackerel management negotiations “for over a decade”.