The European Court of Auditors (ECA) today strongly criticised the use of subsidies in sustaining overcapacity when publishing its investigation entitled “have EU measures contributed to adapting the capacity of the fishing fleets to available fishing opportunities?” The court investigated spending in seven member states (Denmark, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the UK) and found that four had set inadequate targets for reducing their fleet, leading to overcapacity, which the court identify as one of the main reasons behind the “failure of the CFP”.
These findings were welcomed by Commissioner Damanaki, who agreed with their comments regarding overcapacity and stated that a system of TFCs with adequate safeguards to prevent quota concentration would help to solve this endemic problem. She also argued that the proposed EMFF should stop financing the scrapping of vessels while providing funds for projects that will adapt capacity toward more sustainable ends.
Decommissioning programmes were condemned in the ECA report as a waste of resources given that the alignment between fishing capacity and fishing opportunities has been so poorly matched. Despite vast sums being used to remove vessels from the fleet, vessel modernisation being also subsidised has in fact meant that taxpayers’ have paid to both remove some modernise other vessels. This has left the European fleet bloated, uncompetitive and subsidy dependent.
Moreover, the ECA report highlights the outdated methods of defining fishing capacity that member states have applied, namely kW and GT. These no longer reflect the ability of fishing vessels to catch fish and run contrary to the Commission guidelines on how to measure fishing capacity and also feature in the annual report from the Commission to the European Parliament. Better evaluation standards which gauge the efficiency of vessels would better enable fishing opportunities to be matched by catching capacity.
The entrenched failure to deal with overcapacity has been one of the hallmarks of the CFP. However, recent proposals by the Commission on EMFF funding, which contain provisions for modernisation but neglect to include mandatory capacity ceilings are unlikely to solve the problem.