Members of the European Parliament representing 14 nations and all the major political alliances have formed ”Fish For the Future”, a cross-party campaign group to promote radical CFP reform.
“We want to raise people’s awareness that reform of the Common Fisheries Policy has to be founded on sustainability. The capacity of the fishing fleet in Europe is really too big, which means that we are overfishing our stocks”, said the group’s chairman Richard Seeber of Austria, following a meeting with Commissioner Maria Damanaki.
“It is not a very comfortable message, especially for fishermen’s nations. We want to support the Commissioner in her politics to really make a reform which means sustainable fisheries in Europe.”
One of the aims of the new group is to show that involvement in the CFP reform is not limited to members of the EP Fisheries Committee, or to representatives of nations with huge fishing sectors.
Seeber is not a member of that committee, and he represents landlocked Austria.
“All Europeans, also from the landlocked countries, we all want to have fish on our tables. I think this is the most important thing. There are the ones that catch the fish and the ones that eat the fish, and we are the ones who eat it”, he pointed out.
We must ensure that we have fish on the plate in Europe in 50 or 100 years. Anything else is not sustainable. Although, if fish stocks are to recover, of course there are forces who will lose financially in the short term”.