Battling net losses in the harvesting of the sea

Date: 16/01/03

Jörgen Holmquist, director-general for fisheries, took over the job in the wake of the controversial removal of his predecessor, Steffen Smidt. Holmquist talks to David Cronin about the challenges ahead for the DG and the reforms it has already begun

FRANZ Fischler peppers his discourse with Eurojargon. As the Union's commissioner for agriculture and fisheries, he's intimately acquainted with dictionary-defying concepts like "digressivity" and "extensification".

Yet the Austrian used alarmingly blunt terms last year when explaining why sweeping reforms to the EU's 1 billion euro-per-year Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) were crucial. Too many boats are chasing too few fish, he insisted.

There is ample data to support his view that the survival of numerous varieties of fish is endangered because of the rates at which they end up in fishermen's nets. It is estimated, for example, that levels of mature demersal fish - which live at or near the bottom of the sea - were 90 higher in EU waters in the 1970s than the late 1990s.

Swedish official Jörgen Holmquist, head of the European Commission's directorate-general for fisheries (DG Fish), bears responsibility for seeing through the most ambitious shake-up of the CFP in its two-decade history.

Just before Christmas, he was given an all-important mandate by EU marine ministers. After five days of talks, they agreed on the outline of a plan aimed at allowing depleted stocks to recover.

A weighted majority of governments accepted too that taxpayers' money should no longer be used for fleet modernisation after the end of 2004 (although this accord is subject to a number of loopholes, for example aid will still be allowed for safety measures). Money spent before that cut-off date should not be used to increase the capacity of vessels, they vowed.

It was also agreed that aid to new vessels should only continue for that duration. But such funding must be based on the premise that the equivalent of 1.35 fishing vessels should be put out of commission for every vessel over 100 gross tones which benefits from public finance. In any event, there will no more funding of trawlers over 400 gross tonnes.

Holmquist is aware that the deal concluded by the Council of Ministers on 20 December was weaker than a blueprint unveiled by Fischler in May. Yet he is relieved he didn't have to sit down for his Christmas dinner without any deal being secured.

"The French minister Mr [Hervé] Gaymard said twice during that week that maybe there would not be an agreement, that it would have to go to the heads of state," he says. "For the Commission, Mr Fischler had a clear mandate and he couldn't just accept anything; it had to be a strong decision. But the risk existed [that no deal would emerge]. Luckily it didn't happen."

Describing the deal as "fairly precise and detailed", he welcomed the ministers' decision to redirect funds away from building and modernisation and into scrapping. This follows an estimate by the EU's executive that 8.6 of the Union's 100,000-strong fleet needs to be decommissioned to prevent vulnerable stocks from collapsing.

The Commission did, however, climb down somewhat on its demands over another dossier on the ministers' Advent agenda: cod.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas had issued a dire warning about cod levels in the North Sea. This prompted Fischler to seek that the amount of cod caught there in 2003 should be 65 lower than that for the previous year. North Sea cod levels, he said, stand at just 37,000 tonnes, whereas they should be able to produce up to 200,000 tonnes per year if they were exploited prudently.

In the end, most ministers would only endorse a 45 cut. Dissenters Germany and Sweden declined to support the majority position, with Renate Künast, the agriculture and fisheries minister in Berlin, predicting cod stocks may never recover without more drastic measures.

Conservationists have compared the North Sea situation to that experienced off Newfoundland. Over-exploitation there forced a ban on cod fishing about a decade ago, yet levels of stock have never replenished. "If you talk to scientists, they cannot entirely exclude that [the same thing will happen in the North Sea]," Holmquist acknowledges. "Still, that is not a likely development if the catch levels agreed on are adhered to. They would imply an important increase in spawning stock biomass.

"Obviously, the decision the Council accepted involves larger catches than the Commission proposed. It will lead to a longer time to achieve full recovery.

"The main fishing countries in the North Sea - the UK and Denmark - are putting in place substantial scrapping plans, though I understand fishermen in Scotland are very worried [about the impact on their livelihoods]."

The next step in the cod saga should involve a "final recovery plan", due to come into effect on 1 July this year. The Commission has been asked to devise this by 15 February, so that the ensuing debate on it can be wrapped up by the Council of Ministers before the end of March.

Among the other key items on the DG Fish agenda for 2003 will be working out multiannual plans for EU fisheries. These are due to pivot around the principles of reducing the amount of time that vessels spend at sea and strengthening controls on the fleet.

EU governments have agreed that plans covering several years are far preferable to the annual horse-trading over fisheries quotas which have often led to unseemly squabbling.

Holmquist also identifies work on slashing discards of unwanted fish and guidelines on how scientific advice should be employed in EU fisheries policy as important dossiers for the coming year.

Meanwhile, the Commission published a strategy on 23 December for altering the nature of deals giving the EU fleet access to fish in the waters of poor countries.

At present, the Union has 25 fishing accords with states in the wider world, 16 of them with the African, Caribbean and Pacific bloc. These deals have come in for heavy criticism from anti-poverty activists, some of whom regard them as akin to modern-day colonialism.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned in late 2001, for example, of imminent fish shortages in Senegal - where fish is a principal source of protein - due to the level of activity of vessels from rich countries off the West African coastline. Trade liberalisation in the sector, said UNEP, "has had a devastating impact on some key stocks, especially those deep-living coastal species, favoured by European consumers".

The new Commission plan is designed to fulfil commitments made at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in August-September, especially the aim of restoring depleted stocks to sustainable levels by 2015. Under it, the EU is to move away from simply paying for access to developing countries' waters to building "partnership agreements", under which each allocation should be justified by proof it will benefit both parties in the long term.

The paper has come in for some criticism from the World Wide Fund for Nature. Julie Cator, a Brussels-based fisheries campaigner with the group, feels it lacked sufficient details on how these agreements are to be changed.

"The European Commission needs to demonstrate that this is a genuine move towards sustainability and not just a re-branding exercise to justify an expansion of overseas fishing," she said.

Nevertheless, Holmquist defends the blueprint, which he hopes will be endorsed by the Council of Ministers in February. "It's true that it is not a very long communication but it sets principles and establishes these principles very strongly," he explains.

"Our fisheries policy should follow the same principles of sustainable fisheries as we have internally, so that we don't have a different approach for waters outside the EU as we do for our own waters."

Holmquist's own appointment as head of DG Fish in July was preceded by one of the most serious controversies with which the Prodi Commission has been embroiled since taking office in 1999. There was uproar among MEPs over reports that Holmquist's predecessor Steffen Smidt had been dismissed due to lobbying by Spain, then the holder of the EU presidency, which felt his ideas for CFP reform went too far.

Smidt was originally demoted to the post of hors classe advisor with the DG but has since returned to Denmark, where he is now an official in its foreign ministry.

The decision to nominate a fellow Scandinavian - with similar convictions about the need for radical surgery to the CFP - was perceived in some quarters as belated proof that the Commission was willing to stand up to countries like Spain, that are eager to avoid measures which will hurt their powerful fishing lobbies.

Asked if the manner of Smidt's sudden removal from his post had left a bad atmosphere in DG Fish, Holmquist says: "Some felt he had been unfairly attacked in other institutions. I met with Steffen Smidt after I was appointed and we had some very long discussions on fisheries policy. He was very helpful and supportive and I'm happy and thankful that the handover went well.

"Obviously, member states of all kinds argue their case strongly but that's part of their role," he adds. "But I don't feel under any undue pressure. More generally, I can say it is a very good thing we got the reform decision. It is the biggest reform since the fisheries policy started."

Interview with Jörgen Holmquist, the European Commission's director-general for fisheries.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/fisheries/reform/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/fisheries/reform/index_en.htm

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