EU agree to more regional control of fishing

EUROPEAN Parliament and Commission negotiators today finally paved the way for the long-awaited reform of the discredited Common Fisheries Policy in a historic agreement that will place regional decision-making and an end to the practice of dumping dead fish back into the sea at the heart of future fisheries management.

In an eleventh hour compromise, calls for discards to be completely outlawed in European waters by 2019 have been shelved and Member States will be allowed to seek an exemption to allow up to 5 per cent of their fleet’s catches to still be dumped overboard.

But, in a major boost for the Scottish fishing industry, the negotiators have rubber stamped plans for an end to fisheries micromanagement by Brussels bureaucrats and a new system of devolved decision making.

Simon Coveney, the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, who led the negotiations under the Irish Presidency of the European Union, said the new agreement would “change the lives of millions of people across the European Union” and protect the valuable marine resource in European waters.

He declared: “These decisions are really significant and will impact on the sustainability of fishing into the future and for future generations.”

Mr Coveney explained: “We have learned lessons from the existing Common Fisheries Policy which in some areas has failed fishing communities and has failed fish stocks in terms of their protection.

“We have taken two years to design a new model for the next ten years which, in my view, is a radical but also practical fisheries policy for the future that will protect fishing communities and millions of people across the European Union and also, most importantly, ensure that the next generation of coastal communities and fishermen will have stocks to fish that will be in a better state than they are now.”