WWF and the MSC have announced a programme for fourteen Mediterranean fisheries to undergo MSC pre-assessment as part of the MedFish project to encourage increased sustainable fishing.
MedFish has already identified a hundred French and Spanish fisheries, and seven from each country will now be evaluated by independent certifiers and local experts. The initial assessment will evaluate the sustainability of these fisheries, benchmarked against the MSC Fisheries Standard. The resulting scores will provide the basis for plans to improve the sustainability of the fisheries.
The fisheries selected for MSC pre-assessment were chosen to be broadly representative of fishing activities in the Mediterranean. They include a range of commercially important species, including red mullet, anchovy, prawn, octopus, hake or sardine, and encompass a diversity of fishing techniques. The results of the pre-assessments will be available early in 2017. Some of these fisheries may have the opportunity to enter full assessment to the MSC Fisheries Standard.
‘Analysis to date shows that fishing in the Mediterranean is primarily small scale, with fishing vessels targeting multiple species,’ said Camiel Derichs, director for the MSC in Europe. ‘It also shows a lack of data, raising concerns about the long term sustainability of Mediterranean fishing. These pre-assessments to the MSC Standard will an important step towards helping fisheries understand what is required to safeguard Mediterranean seafood supplies for future generations.’
On the French side, MedFish takes in octopus trap fishing, sardine purse seining, the hake trawl fishery, sea bass and bream trammel netting and wedge clam dredging by hand, all of which take place in the Gulf of Lion, plus the Corsica longline denti fishery and the Languedoc-Roussillon mutable dog whelk trap fishery.
Spanish fisheries under MedFish are the longline hake fishery in the Gulf of Lion, the Palamós red shrimp fishery, beach seining for sandeels in the Balearic Islands, trap fishing for striped soldier shrimp, the Villajoyosa and Santa Pola red mullet fishery, the purse seine anchovy fishery from Caleta de Vélez and other ports, and the Mar Menor camarote prawn trap fishery.
