By Euan Dunn, Head of Marine Policy
Today’s EU Fisheries Council is make or break for the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The Council will seek to agree on a so-called General Approach to the reform, setting out detailed positions on the entire proposed basic regulation of the CFP. Legally, this is a procedure not often used, but essentially it would lock the Council’s position on the core of the reform ahead of the autumn negotiations with the European Parliament.
The reformed CFP was originally due to enter into force on 1 January 2013 but is now widely anticipated to be delayed by months as turf wars break out between Member States and backroom deals are struck. But so it ever was: as Richard Benyon said on this morning’s Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme, it’s a ‘broken system’.
After three decades of mismanagement from Brussels, aided and abetted by a European fishing industry locked in a mortal embrace with its Fisheries Ministers, EU waters are now much more overfished than those of many developing countries, to the detriment of fish stocks, the environment and the livelihoods of all those involved in the fishing industry. 75% of European fish stocks are overexploited and almost one-third of jobs in the industry have been lost in the last decade alone.
It was that last point, the freefall profitability of fishing, that more than anything drove the Commission’s ambition to ratchet down a bloated fleet across Europe, put at 2-3 times the level needed for sustainable fishing and a viable industry. In its proposal for reform in July last year, the Commission nailed its colours to the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development 2002 mast and aimed for sustainable fishing levels, so-called Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) by 2015 at the latest.
This key plank of the Commission’s strategy has been rejected by most Member States, including the UK, who are seeking a more flexible and incremental approach for achieving the MSY goal. There is also little buy-in for the Commission’s proposals for a discard ban, and no deadline for the introduction of multi-annual plans that would lock Ministers into harvesting constraints and do away with the current horse-trading which continues to result in Ministers routinely setting annual quotas in excess of scientific advice. The Ministers agree that action plans are needed to cut excess fishing capacity but specific measures and deadlines are missing from the deal on the table today. The desire to shift away from the Commission’s top-down command-and-control approach to management and embrace a more regionalised approach is blunted by legal constraint – this much vaunted ambition in the Commission’s original thinking is withering on the vine – a lion roared and a mouse was born. Last but not least, safeguarding the marine environment on which fisheries depend has not had the primacy it needs.
In October 2002, at the time of the last decadal reform of the CFP, I wrote in ‘The Guardian’ (’Net losses’): ‘So it is vital now that the Council does not dilute the thrust of the Commission’s reforms. If it does, it will be repeating the stillborn mid-term review of the CFP in 1992 when, despite strong conclusions from the Commission on the worrying state of Europe’s fish stocks and over-capacity, the measures finally adopted did not check growing fishing pressure and dwindling catches. By the next time the Ministers review the CFP [in 2012], in an enlarged EU, it is highly likely that, short of bold action right now, there will be little left to save anyway: like bald men fighting over a comb’.
That bold action is needed more than ever at today’s Council to avert another groundhog day. We look to the UK as one of the more progressive Member States to be alive to this litany of failure and to show the political will and courage to resist business-as-usual. If the latest proposed backroom deal is adopted, it will drive a further decade of overfishing with disastrous consequences. Europe’s finance ministers are learning the painful lesson that you can’t keep borrowing from what you don’t have; likewise their fisheries colleagues need to adopt a Common Fisheries Policy that stops plundering our fish stock capital before we have a meltdown of Europe’s seas as well as our banking system.
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