Denmark’s parliamentary parties have reached an agreement on annual state leasing and auction of fishing rights, including the auctioning of unused quotas and taxation on quotas, a move that the Danish Fishermen’s Association is deeply dissatisfied with.
Chairman Svend-Erik Andersen stated that the parties and the Danish parliament have failed Danish fishing.
‘This agreement creates great uncertainty over the quota basis for Danish fisheries at a time when we are also facing the shadow of Brexit and the Landing Obligation – with major changes taking place in fisheries,’ he said, adding that the surprise has been compounded by the fact that this has all been agreed without any dialogue with the industry.
‘It is clear in the previous agreement between the parliamentary parties that any work on ‘freeing up funds from the fishing industry to initiate initiatives for the benefit and development of Danish fishing’ should take place within a dialogue with the industry. But we have not been involved in any such dialogue,’ Svend-Erik Andersen said.
Bureaucratic monster
The withdrawal of quotas has taken the sector by surprise, as in practice this means that quotas are returned to the state, which will then auction them.
As Svend-Erik Andersen points out, these are frequently quotas that fishermen have bought, and which the Danish parliament decided as late as 2016 would have a 16-year lifetime.
‘As far as the Danish Fishermen’s Association is concerned, this is another word for expropriation. The whole auction model appears to be a bureaucratic monster, which may have the opposite effect of ensuring quota uptake. The requirement to purchase licenses will also make it more expensive to set up as a fisherman and develop new fisheries – will it spark development in the industry?’
He commented that it is absurd for the political parties to enter into such an agreement just as Brexit generates such a high level of uncertainty.
‘Will we lose access to UK waters? Will Brexit mean that there will be much greater fishing pressure in the Baltic, the North Sea and the Skagerrak, because Danish and other EU countries’ vessels, which have previously fished in British waters, will seek out the remaining EU waters?’ he said, adding that this is on top of the requirement for fishermen to land fish for which they have no quota as of 1st January this year.
‘Everyone is aware that the current package of changes is on such a scale that it places a great deal of pressure on the fishing industry,’ Svend-Erik Andersen said.
‘It may seem that the parliament does not have an overview of the challenges facing the fishing industry. We need stable national frameworks, and not initiatives that are repeatedly questioned about the conditions for running businesses,’ he said.
