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EU Common Fisheries Policy
The current EU fisheries policy has failed on all fronts: 72% of assessed European fish stocks are overfished and fishing activity inflicts widespread collateral damage on marine ecosystems, including seabirds and other marine wildlife.
We estimate that 200,000 seabirds die annually in the gears of European fisheries. The continuous decrease in the volume of fish caught by European fishermen has resulted in a severe decline of many communities whose livelihoods depend on fishing. Many businesses survive only thanks to subsidies.
Parts of the EU fleet are still up to three times too big compared with the available fish resources, despite the vast public resources spent trying to restore the balance.
Reform proposals
On 13 July 2011, the European Commission published its proposal for the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), intended to provide a radical framework for sustainable fisheries management after 2012. The reform proposal includes a number of major innovations but falls well short of the ambition envisaged by the 2009 Green Paper which included:
'This must not be yet another piecemeal, incremental reform, but a sea change cutting to the core reasons behind the vicious circle in which Europe's fisheries have been trapped in recent decades'.
We believe that the reform proposal critically fails to break this 'vicious circle' by not providing the necessary framework, tools and safeguards to reduce overcapacity of the fleet and guarantee a genuine shift towards ecologically sustainable fisheries.
Working in a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we are looking to the European Parliament and Fisheries Ministers to support and strengthen the Commission proposal in the following five areas:
1. Healthy ecosystems must be the primary objective of the CFP
While we welcome the commitment to end overfishing, the proposal fails to address the problem of unfocused policy objectives, identified in the 2009 CFP Green Paper as one of the CFP's five key structural failings. In this regard, it does not clearly recognise achieving ecological sustainability as a precondition for delivering social and economic sustainability.
We call on EU institutions:
- To support the objective of stock recovery beyond levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield by 2015
- To tighten the objective of the CFP ensuring that environmental sustainability is clearly recognised as a precondition for achieving social and economic sustainability
- To ensure that the objectives explicitly mention the need for the CFP to contribute to the achievement of good environmental status of EU waters by 2020 under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and favourable conservation status under the Birds and Habitats Directives.
2. Robust ecosystem-based approach to fisheries with obligatory long term management plans
The proposal includes a strong commitment to an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries, but to avoid previous failures on this front, the Regulation must provide for effective mechanisms to make it work.
We call on EU institutions:
- To strengthen the Commission text and ensure that the impacts of fishing activities on the marine ecosystem are 'minimised', not just 'limited'
- To support provisions calling for the development of ecosystem-based multi-annual plans for each fishery and ensure that firm timelines for their development are included
- To include provisions calling for elimination of discards and also bycatch of other non-target species such as seabirds and marine turtles (ie not just commercial fish species), and make sure that 'unwanted catches' are properly defined
- To strengthen the Commission text with regard to ensuring that catch limits and fishing effort ceilings cannot be set above the level of official scientific advice.
We support Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'Fish Fight' for the compelling way it has put discarding of 'unwanted' fish on the CFP reform agenda as one of the most blatant symptoms of unsustainable fishing. While several seabird species around our coasts have prospered on a diet of discards over decades of industrial trawling, we see this as essentially another human distortion of the marine environment – discards need to be curbed to help restore fish stocks and rebuild a more sustainable food web.
Now that Fish Fight has highlighted the problem so powerfully, the over-riding focus has to be on giving fishermen the incentives and technology they need to avoid catching discardable fish in the first place.
We hope that Fish Fight will also help focus the CFP spotlight on the need to avoid catching not just unwanted fish but also seabirds and all the other marine wildlife that fisheries kill accidentally as 'bycatch'. Like fish discards, the solutions to prevent fishing gear killing seabirds are already in routine use in many regions of the world.
Fish Fight has exposed how far short of best fisheries practice the EU has fallen compared with much of the developed world. We now need to translate the enormous public demand for action into political will and lasting solutions for 'clean' fisheries.
3. The EU fleet must be cut to match fish stock resources and environmentally-friendly fisheries should be prioritised
There is no doubt that the EU needs to significantly reduce its fleet to match fish stock resources. We acknowledge that the market scheme of Transfer Fishing Concessions (TFCs) as proposed by the Commission can, under the right conditions, result in some reduction of overall fleet capacity. However, we have serious concerns about the total reliance on the TFC approach and the lack of other tools in the proposal, in effect the lack of a mechanism to ensure that the 'right' capacity in both quantitative and qualitative terms will be achieved.
To address this qualitative gap, priority access to fish resources should be given to those who fish in the most environmentally and socially sustainable way. This can be achieved by applying ranking criteria which favour operators with the least impact on the marine environment, who can demonstrate compliance with legislation, and who operate within and contribute to local coastal communities.
We call on EU institutions:
- To include targets and timelines for the reduction of overcapacity and restructuring of the fleet of each Member State with penalties (such as reductions in EU funds or relevant quota) for non-compliance
- To reject the compulsory nature of the Transferable Fishing Concession scheme and ensure that there is discretion for Member States to choose from a range of tools that best suit the allocation of access to fishing opportunities
- To introduce a new way to distribute access to fisheries resources using sustainability criteria which favour best practice.
4. The CFP must help safeguard marine Natura 2000 sites
Marine Natura 2000 sites are the jewels of our seas, holding populations of species and habitats which are threatened or rare in Europe, which the EU committed to safeguard for future generations. In this regard, it's welcome that the Commission has introduced a provision aiming to allow Member States to take measures protecting these sites from the impact of fisheries, without having to resort to the decision of Parliament and Council. However, we believe that unless the proposed CFP text is radically improved, it risks creating legal ambiguity and even undermining the current level of protection.
We call on EU institutions:
- To strengthen and clarify the proposal to ensure that Member states are empowered to take measures in order to comply with their obligations as regards Special Protection Areas pursuant to Article 4 of Council Directive 2009/147/EC (Birds Directive) and Special Areas of Conservation pursuant to Article 6 of Council Directive 92/43/EEC (Habitats Directive).
5. Aquaculture must be sustainable and with minimal impact on biodiversity
At a time of severely depleted fish stocks, aquaculture is being seen as a solution to meeting ever increasing demand for fish products. Worryingly there is no sign in the Commission proposal of any safeguards for ensuring that the aquaculture sector is developed in a sustainable way, with minimum impact on biodiversity and that does not end up with the same problems as the catching sector is facing today, namely over-capacity, poor profitability and dependence on subsidies.
We call on EU institutions:
- To strengthen the proposal by explicitly stating that EU strategic guidelines and Multiannual national strategic plans developed by Member states should aim at ensuring sustainability of the aquaculture sector and minimising its impact on the environment.
Promoting our aims
In pursuit of the aims under these five headings, we promote our policies to fishing organisations, the Regional Advisory Councils, the UK Government, Devolved Administrations, other European Member States and to the European Commission and European Parliament.
We led on BirdLife International's response to the European Commission's Green Paper on the 2013 reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (see Putting the environment at the heart of the Common fisheries Policy reform).
We represent BirdLife International and other environmental NGOs on the European Commission's Advisory Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture (ACFA) and we are also a member of the North Sea Regional Advisory Council (NSRAC) and the North Western Waters RAC.
While the main focus of our work is on fisheries in the open sea and how they affect fish stocks and birds, we also work to promote better management and regulation of cage fish-farming, especially in Scotland, in order to make the aquaculture industry more environmentally-sound.
Last modified: 16 September 2011