Miles Collins

European Union cocks it up again…

The European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy is in tatters and that’s the verdict of its own officials. Following some twenty five years of policy initiatives and inevitable policy changes they are now saying that a larger proportion of the responsibility for adhering to fishing quotas should be returned to the individual EU members. So there you have it, we’ve come full circle. Think of all the meetings, lunches, dinners, all expenses paid trips, hotel rooms etc over the years for these Brussels based beaurocrats to finally establish that a centraly operated scheme which dictates quotas and stocking issues doesn’t work.

Year on year they have ignored the scientific advice provided them which detailed the shockingly low levels of bluefin tuna, cod and anchovy. Politicians from landlocked member countries are voting on issues directly affecting those EU states whose economy is based quite significantly on the fishing industry and it is these countries who are facing the financial consequences of a real, long lasting initiative by the EU.

Whichever way anyone wants to cut it the EU is guilty of mismanagement and the member states involved are just as guilty of chronic overfishing to an extent unheard of in other parts of the world. Cod is a prime example, for years now environmental campaigners and scientists alike have been calling for a reduction in the amount of cod being caught and, more recently for a temporary banning order to allow stocks to recover. Bloody environmentalists? No, not in my opinion. Last year the EU ignored all calls for a reduction in quotas and actually increased the allowance despite the fact that 93% of all cod caught were not large enough to reproduce. They blame member states for calling for increased quotas and the politicians blame public demmand and the risk to jobs for their fishermen and so on. The fact is that year on year the EU increases the quotas by between 25% and 35% more than the scientists reccomend.

Why not catch something else? So who is catching it all? Well Spain is the number one with an estimated annual catch of €1.6 billion, not suprisingly they have the largest fishing fleet of some 13,000 vessels but yet they eat considerably less fish per head than their Portuguese counterparts who eat on average a staggering 57 kilos per year. France is next on the list with an annual catch of €842 million followed by the UK at €680 million but with a fleet half the size of the Spanish. Indeed the number of fishermen in the UK has fallen by half in the last thirty years with the size of the UK fleet falling by almost two thousand vessels since 1997.

So where is all of this going to leave us, our economies and the state of our natural larder? Left in the hands of the EU I dread to think.