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The fishing sector gives its priorities for fisheries subsidies

09 April 2012

At a public hearing organised in the European Parliament on 'The new European Maritime and Fisheries Fund in the context of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) Reform,' the representative of the Spanish fishing sector and Europêche insisted on the need ‘to maintain the aid for permanent (scrapping) and temporary cessations’, including the creation of a 'crisis fund' to deal with possible breaches of fisheries agreements. It considered that the new EMFF proposal ‘does not include actions to improve the quality of landed products or flexible emergency policies to meet specific reconversion fleet needs because of fishing agreement suspensions’.

However, at the Fisheries Council meeting which discussed the EMFF, the EC Commissioner maintained her position that aid for scrapping will no longer be available after 2013, and that other measures will be supported to help the fleet adapt to the new policy, such as the development of more selective fishing techniques, and incentives for aquaculture.

Editorial comment

Fisheries subsidies for scrapping, including for those vessels fishing in ACP waters, has not proved very effective. For example, in some cases scrapping consisted of selling the vessel, which then continued to fish under another flag in ACP waters. However, in the future, solutions will have to be found to avoid such situations whereby ‘undesirable’ vessels fishing under an FPA (for example where there is no identified resource surplus), are allowed simply to disappear from the EU register, only to be reflagged to a third country and to continue fishing in the same grounds.

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