The European Court of Auditors (ECA) today presented its ‘EU fisheries controls: more efforts needed’ special report to the European Parliament. Europêche, which represents industry bodies across the EU, does not consider that the report reflects significant progress made on fisheries control and monitoring over the last years nor the actual situation in the whole European Union.
The Government has presented a bill to parliament which substantially seeks to reform fisheries policies and the administration of the country’s most vital resource. According to the government, this reform sets out to promote sustainability and change the way in which fishing licenses are administered. On the other hand, the industry remains uneasy and unconvinced.
The Council of the EU and the European Parliament have reached a political agreement on a new legislative framework for the sustainable management of the external fishing fleets. The new regime sets out strict, transparent and harmonised rules for issuing and managing fishing authorisations to EU vessels fishing outside Community waters and to foreign vessels operating in EU waters.
Last week saw the 10th anniversary of the EU Long Distance Fleet Advisory Council (LDAC), the EU stakeholder body formed by representatives of the fishing industry, seafood processing and marketing sectors, trade unions and NGOs.
According to ICES, the western Baltic cod stock has not improved as expected, with another year with a further downward revision in biomass and upward revision in fishing exploitation rate, although ICES notes that there was a surprisingly good recruitment in 2016 which, if protected from overfishing, may help replenish this severely overfished stock.
Shetland Fishermen’s Association has recruited a new policy officer to join its team in promoting the interests of the industry.
We like to see a clever app, and it doesn’t do any harm when the app is something that has the potential to make life easier for everyone; fishermen, management and scientists.
The special report by the European Court of Auditors on the effectiveness of the EU fisheries control system has been welcomed by the European Commission.
Australia’s 2017-18 Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery (SESSF) fishing season started at the beginning of this month and all trawl boats taking part met the deadline for fitting seabird mitigation arrangements.
The first working version of the Information System of the Global Record of Fishing Vessels, Refrigerated Transport Vessels and Supply Vessels (Global Record) has been released to member countries in order to collect their data.