Borg targets dumping of EU’s surplus fish

The European Commission will next Wednesday (28 March) propose an end to fishing practices that see several million tonnes of sea-life dumped back into the water every year.

Under current EU fisheries laws, fishermen are faced with strict fishing quotas for many key fish species and face fines if a vessel is caught carrying more than its total allowable catch (TAC).

These rules encourage fishermen to dump tonnes of unwanted fish, or ‘by-catch’, before docking. This by-catch can include rare birds and sea mammals as well as threatened fish species.

Under the Commission’s plan, fishermen would have to land everything they caught.

Instead of leaving by-catch to rot in the sea, the policy paper will say, it should be sorted onshore, where it would count against new quotas of by-catch. Any fishery found to be repeatedly breaching its by-catch quotas could be closed down to give stocks time to recover.

"Discards are wrong because they amount to waste of a very precious resource," said a spokeswoman for Joe Borg, the European fisheries commissioner.

By-catch taken ashore could be turned into protein or oil, or sold for human consumption, the communication will suggest. But the fishermen who caught it would only receive a small fraction of the income from by-catch, to cover handling costs.

A similar approach to by-catches has already been adopted in Norway and Iceland.

The Commission hopes that obliging fishermen to fill storage space on their ships with unwanted fish would encourage the development of new technologies to reduce by-catch. But practical by-catch quotas would have to be agreed, as would the point at which fisheries should be closed.

Member states would also have to find a way of making sure nothing was discarded, without resorting to the very expensive option of posting a warden on every boat.

Fuel consumption and polluting emissions are also likely to be raised as potential problems. Fishermen would fill up their trawlers more quickly and be forced to dock several times with by-catch before having room to meet their legal TAC.

"We can’t hide away and say everything will be easy," said the spokeswoman. "But in the past, as for example when the US placed limits on sulphur dioxide emissions to combat acid rain, technology developments have followed quotas."

Saskia Richartz of the environmental group Greenpeace said the Norwegian model was the right one for the EU to adopt.

"It is a complicated system but we have pretty good confirmation it works in Norway and can end discards."

Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, said: "Frankly, this is alarming. There is already an enormous amount of work going on to tackle discards. If technical measures were that simple we would already have them."

The European Commission will next Wednesday (28 March) propose an end to fishing practices that see several million tonnes of sea-life dumped back into the water every year.