The EU and Norway have reached agreement on next year’s catch quotas and fishing rules for common waters that includes extended TACs for fishermen willing to accept onboard surveillance to bring down discards.
Trials with extended landing quotas for fishermen who agree to onboard documentation that no discards are made, including camera surveillance, are already underway in both Denmark and Scotland, the dominating player in UK fisheries, and Norway has had a discard ban for several years.
Under the new EU-Norway agreement, member states will now have up to 12 percent extra cod for boats that agree to these fully documented fisheries.
As for whiting, a new Long-term management plan (LTMP) was adopted, and a TAC increase set at 15 percent will hopefully reduce discards, a serious problem for this stock.The agreement was greeted positively, with reservations, by parties usually as disparate as the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) and the Scottish government.
Noting that up to 50 percent of all fish caught in the North Sea is thrown back, the WWF published a statement welcoming the agreement ”which aims to halt the wasteful practice of discarding, particularly for cod and whiting, and urges EU Fisheries Ministers to endorse it at the upcoming Fisheries Council (13-14 December) in Brussels”.
The WWF added, however, that in order to successfully manage the quotas, control measures need to be improved, allocated quota must be kept under the estimated discard levels, and in the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to be in force in 2013, LTMPs should be mandatory by 2015, replacing the “yearly haggling over quota”.
In a statement from the Scottish government, fisheries secretary Richard Lochhead noted that, under the new agreement, “Scotland’s catch quota scheme, whereby fishermen land everything they catch without the wasteful discards imposed on our fishermen by the EU’s flawed Common Fisheries Policy, will be extended”.
“Scottish fishermen will be able to land, rather than having to discard, an extra amount equal to 12 per cent of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for Cod. This will enable us to more than double the number of boats participating in the scheme, to around 40. Therefore, landing more yet catching less will help the stock”, he added.
On the other hand, Lochhead said he was disappointed that all fishermen could still not participate in the trial scheme, and that Norway “did not support extending this innovative scheme to other species”.
As for the current conflict over mackerel quotas between the EU, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, Lochhead said he hoped that a three-part deal would be ready next week, following “the regrettable decision by Iceland to walk away from talks, putting at risk a carefully managed fishery that is Scotland’s most valuable stock”.