Several senior Commission officials including Director General also present in the meeting to discuss the future reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. The meeting was held in Rome and, along with a large number of Commission officials, was attended by representatives of major fishing organisations from across Europe.
The meeting was organized by Europeche, the European Association of Producer Organisations and Cogeca (the association of fishing cooperatives). The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the contents of the Commission’s forthcoming Green Paper on CFP reform. It is informed that the Green Paper is expected to be published at the end of April and will signal the start of a year long debate on the reforms. The revised CFP will take force from 1st January 2013, although many of the measures would be phased in after that date.
The Commission made very clear that the general economic climate would make conditions in the fishing industry very difficult in the near future. Whilst member states are dealing with their “monumental debts” this is bound to have an impact on the funding available to the successor to the European Fisheries fund after 2013. Although a number of the planned reforms are in the direction that the NFFO has been arguing for over a number of years, it is not likely that those arguments have suddenly proved persuasive.
NFO has welcomed the radical CFP reform, but is wary of the dangers of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, particularly with regard to any ill-thought through move away from the principle of Relative Stability. The meeting provided the opportunity to warn of the dangers of undermining national quota management arrangements that in some member states were quite sophisticated and already adhered to the principles of rights based management.
The Commission said that the sector’s profitability and therefore resilience to external shocks, is undermined by fleet overcapacity, although during the meeting it was forced to concede that some member states and some fisheries had made huge efforts to address the issue through publicly funded decommissioning schemes. The Commission also agreed that effort control was a profoundly anti-economic instrument, only justifiable where member states have not adequately dealt with the overcapacity issue.
