The press communiqué states that the EU and Norway have reached agreement on next year’s catch quotas and fishing rules for common waters. The agreement includes extended TACs for fishermen who are willing to accept onboard surveillance to bring down discards. Trials with extended landing quotas for fishermen who agree to onboard documentation are already underway in some nations.
This EU-Norway agreement allow the member states to have up to 12 percent extra cod for boats that agree to these fully documented fisheries. As for whiting, a new Long-term management plan (LTMP) was adopted, and a TAC increase set at 15 percent will hopefully reduce discards, a serious problem for this stock.
The WWF added, however, that in order to successfully manage the quotas, control measures need to be improved, allocated quota must be kept under the estimated discard levels, and in the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to be in force in 2013, LTMPs should be mandatory by 2015, replacing the “yearly haggling over quota”. In a statement from the Scottish government, fisheries secretary Richard Lochhead noted that, under the new agreement, “Scotland’s catch quota scheme, whereby fishermen land everything they catch without the wasteful discards imposed on our fishermen by the EU’s flawed Common Fisheries Policy, will be extended”.
