Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy has failed and a completely new fishing management system is needed, the European Commission has admitted.
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels A new Brussels position paper highlighted severe problems with fisheries and urged a complete rethink of a key European Union policy. EU officials have been forced to admit that, despite the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), 88 per cent of European fish stocks are over-fished, compared to 25 per cent elsewhere in the world. Almost a third – 30 per cent – of managed fisheries are “outside safe biological limits, they cannot reproduce at normal because the parenting population is too depleted”, said the paper. “Yet in many fisheries we are fishing two or three more times more than what fish stocks can sustain.” … The commission has blamed fishing fleets for over-fishing and national governments for failing to enforce catch quota limits agreed annually under the CFP. … Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Conservative MEP and fisheries spokesman in the European Parliament, has called for fishing policy to be decentralised. He highlighted figures showing that British fishermen have seen 60 per cent of their whitefish fleet scrapped and thousands of jobs destroyed. …
European Commission admits failure of fishing policy
