13 June 2011
..to which no fishing industry representatives were invited, again put herself in environmental vanguard. The NFFO’s letter below questions whether her self-defined status and her policies line up.
Discard Damanaki
You have to admire Commissioner Damanaki’s sheer political skill and audacity in putting herself at the head of a crusade to end the discarding of fish in European waters. She has deftly shifted the focus of hostile media attention arising from Hugh’s Fish Fight away from the European Commission and onto member states and the fishing industry by advocating a simple ban on discards.
But wait a minute. This is the same Commissioner who this week also published her “Communication” on how the Commission intends to approach its proposals for fishing quotas in 2012. If in November and December, the Council of Ministers follows the Commission’s proposals, the result will be a huge increase in the amount of discards. Many thousands of additional tonnes of valuable and marketable fish will be discarded. This is because of the intention to slash by 25% all quotas on which scientific data is poor – accounting for perhaps 60% of the stocks on which the International Council for Exploration of the Seas provides assessments. Many of these stocks are in mixed fisheries so the fish will continue to be caught – but not now landed. They will go over the side.
Discards are a waste of the resource and are terrible for the fishing industry’s reputation. But one statistic that has not been to the fore, in either Hugh’s Fish Fight or Commissioner Damanaki’s subsequent pronouncements: over the last decade the English fishing fleet has reduced its discards by 50%. This is real progress that must be continued. It will not be helped by blunt gesture politics in the form of a theoretical ban. And it will certainly not be achieved if the Commission continues to increase the amount of discards required by regulation.