Not quite the cod wars

Posted by Willie — 8 December 2008 at 6:02pm - Comments

 The Norwegian coastguard captured this footage of the Prolific discarding up to 80% of its catch of endangered fish

Norwegian coastguards filmed this UK trawler discarding 80% of its catch of endangered fish just outside Norwegian waters earlier this year

Every year the EU and Norway get together to agree how to share out fishing quotas in their adjacent waters (remember, Norway is not a member of the EU, and has it's own exclusive fishing zone, unlike EU countries). They are gathering this week, and it always happens before the annual quota-haggling meeting of the EU Council in Brussels, where the EU decide and divide on quotas for fish in EU waters.

Usually they do their best to ignore scientific advice, and amazingly all of the fisheries ministers seem to manage to go back home claiming to have won a 'good deal' for their respective fishing industries.

But this year the thorny issue of discards (fish that are caught and killed but thrown back into the sea) is causing conflict between Norway (which has a discard ban on commercially important fish species) and the EU (which doesn't). This has been brought to a head by the Norwegian coastguard's documentation of large amounts of fish being discarded by UK trawlers fishing in Norwegian waters.

Although these boats have a license to fish there, they cannot dump unwanted catch because of Norwegian law, so they move out into EU waters and dump the fish there. Understandably Norway is furious at this wastage, as is everyone who sees the footage. But it needs to be taken in context because this is not an isolated incident, it’s happening in all EU waters on a daily basis. The EU's own scientists have said that every second cod or haddock caught in the North Sea is thrown back dead.

Fishermen, conservationists, scientists and politicians are all agreed that discards are a scandalous waste of life – and it is even more relevant in these tough economic times to see such perfectly good food being wasted.

But what can be done about them? Norway says the EU must implement its own ban on the practice. At the very least, they have to stop the practice of high-grading, where only the most lucrative fish are kept. For Greenpeace this is more evidence that we need a radical overhaul in the way we manage fisheries. As well as reducing fishing capacity, and stopping the most destructive forms of fishing, like beam trawling, we need to move to more selective ways of fishing.

But we also need to have large areas set up as marine reserves which are off limits to fishing and other destructive activities - we are already seeing closed areas being used for fisheries in the North Sea, but this needs to be implemented at a much larger scale.

That we still have this problem is yet more testament to the fact that the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) isn't working. A policy designed to manage access and sustainability of Europe's fish stocks is responsible for trashing species after species. The CFP is up for review soon – maybe there is hope for Europe's fish stocks.

About Willie

Hi, I'm Willie, I work with Greenpeace on all things ocean-related

Twitter: @williemackenzie

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