Photo: V.A.Buzun and BFN of SPNS
Contact: Stella Nemecky
In the coming months, the EU will revise its rules on fisheries control, a cornerstone legislation for the sustainable use of EU seas. The Fisheries Control Regulation is the EU’s system for monitoring, inspection and enforcement of fishing in EU waters and the EU’s fishing fleet’s global operations. The Control Regulation is key to enabling fishers, decision-makers and civil society to count the fish taken out of our seas, and to monitor the impact of fishing activities on the marine ecosystems. The revised Control Regulation offers the opportunity to contribute to a post-pandemic recovery that is more aligned with the balance of nature and can empower citizens to make better informed and more responsible seafood purchases.
This is a welcome and timely revision of the EU control rules, as it is clear that the current system does not work properly. Today, 89% of the EU fleet is not monitored, there are severe problems with fish being discarded at sea, and there is little transparency about how member states are controlling their fisheries.
The European Commission has proposed an overhaul to the Control Regulation, aiming to digitize fisheries control and get rid of loopholes and exemptions. This includes introducing electronic logbooks for all EU vessels, an approach that has already been tried and tested for small scale vessels in Croatia and helps provide crucial data about fish stocks and inform sustainable fisheries management. The Commission also proposes using remote electronic monitoring (REM), a system comprising net sensors and cameras to better monitor fishing operations to avoid the wasteful practice of discarding unwanted catches. This has been tried and tested in many EU countries, including in Denmark. The Commission has also proposed streamlining and digitizing supply chains to ensure that seafood products can be traced from net to plate. Not only will this help bring clear information to consumers, it is also crucial in the fight against illegal fishing.
The European Parliament agreed on their position in March. While members of the Parliament agreed to several of the advances mentioned above, they fell notably short on two key issues.
Firstly, they decided that REM should only be used for controlling the landing obligation, and not for monitoring ecosystem issues, such as bycatch of marine mammals and seabirds. This is a missed opportunity. In the Baltic Sea, where the population of Baltic proper harbour porpoise has plummeted to extremely low levels, equipping fishing vessels with REM technology could be instrumental to mitigating bycatch and returning the population to healthy levels.
Secondly, the Parliament decided to significantly backtrack on accurate reporting of seafood. They proposed allowing fishing operators to omit up to 40% of catches (and up to 50% in the case of tuna) from the EU fleet’s fishing records. This would legalize underreporting of catches, undermine scientific data to evaluate the status of fish stocks, and could render fisheries control efforts ineffective.
All eyes are now on the EU member states currently negotiating their joint position and aiming to finalize negotiations in June. WWF calls on member states to embrace these new technologies which have the potential to make accountable and sustainable fishing in EU seas possible, providing both a comprehensive record of the fish caught and of the impact of fishing activities on sensitive and protected species like marine mammals and seabirds. Any changes to this key regulation should improve the sustainability and long-term prospects for our ocean and for fishers.
This article is part of the WWF Baltic Newsletter – May 2021
