Bid to tighten rules on fishing aid sparks clash

Date: 03/06/1999

By Simon Taylor

ACTING Fisheries Commissioner Emma is set to clash with fisheries ministers next week over plans to limit public subsidies for building new fishing vessels.

Officials say that the dispute is the most serious since the Commission tabled plans three years ago to cut the EU's bloated fishing fleet by up to 40% to protect dwindling fish stocks.

The new battle centres on proposed new rules to govern how regional aid money is spent on the fishing industry which are designed to flesh out the reforms agreed in Berlin in March.

Governments are anxious to agree the rules at the meeting of fisheries ministers next Thursday (10 June), amid fears that they could otherwise be denied access to several billion euro worth of aid when the new regime comes into force from 1 January next year.

Bonino is insisting that governments should not be allowed to use public money to replace vessels which were originally paid for with regional aid funds. She is also adamant that for every one new vessel built using public money, governments should scrap 1.3 old vessels.

The aim is to ensure that there is a real reduction in the EU's fleet, which is already too big for the Union's depleted fishing stocks. "We do not want to have to pay twice, once for scrapping vessels and again to build new vessels to replace the ones we have scrapped," said one Bonino aide.

But this has provoked a storm of protest from major fishing nations such as Spain and France which argue that they need as much flexibility as possible in deciding how to allocate the money.

The strongest opposition has, however, come from the Dutch, because the Netherlands has failed to meet its targets for reducing fishing capacity. Under the new rules, The Hague would not be able to spend public money on building new vessels until it had met those targets.

Only the UK and Denmark support the German presidency's latest compromise plan. They would like to see the EU go further in reducing fleet sizes.

Officials are predicting that in order to get a deal, ministers may link the dispute over aid to another controversial issue.

The UK and Ireland are furious at the small quotas they are being offered as part of plans to share out the annual 133,000 tonne total catch of low-grade blue whiting. Both argue that the Commission's decision to use a new system to calculate the share-out discriminates against their fleets. They claim the changes would give them about one third of their usual catches, while the Netherlands and Germany would be given quotas up to 50% higher than their actual landings.