Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-29-Speech-3-030"
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"en.20020529.5.3-030"2
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"Mr President, honourable Members, ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to be able to present to you today the proposal for the reform of the common fisheries policy which we decided yesterday in committee should be presented to the Fisheries Council and Parliament. It is not an exaggeration or mere rhetoric to say that only far-reaching reform will guarantee our fishermen and our fish stocks a future. The current fisheries policy is not sustainable and is therefore doomed to fail. More and more stocks are threatened by collapse. Fishing capacity is going up, not down. Controls and sanctions are uneven and therefore unfair. It is costing more and more to land fewer and fewer fish. Economic opportunities for fishermen are deteriorating and, despite higher public subsidies, many have to give up their trade.
However, if necessary, additional new funds will be made available for scrapping and for social assistance. That is the main difference. As I said, without reforms, 8 000 jobs a year have been lost over the last few years. Around EUR 100 million has been earmarked over the entire term of the current structural programme for social measures to secure these jobs. EUR 800 million have been marked for vessel renewal. We really do need to focus more on people and ensure this extra money is used for their good, not for new ships!
The result of all these efforts will be a smaller but more competitive fleet, the fishing effort of which will be much better adapted to the resources available. The fleet will also be healthier economically and less dependent on aid. In order to strengthen uniform monitoring of fisheries, we intend to establish a common fisheries control structure. We intend to coordinate national and EU control activities and to combine the funds earmarked for the purpose. After all, fishermen do not just fish within the borders of their own country, so why should inspectors be restricted to their own territorial waters? Inspections – be they in the Bay of Biscay or in the Channel – will be carried out in future by teams of inspectors from several Member States. But common inspections also require harmonised sanctions. Member States who do not respect the common rules will face quota reductions, fishing effort reductions or cuts to their FIFG funds.
I am well aware that the sector will at first be wary of some aspects of this approach. We cannot hold this against them, because those who are directly affected by the fisheries policy have traditionally been excluded from any decision-making. So, here too, we must find a new approach and make the sector our first and most important policy adviser. To achieve this, all our decisions must be transparent and understandable, so that fishermen no longer feel they are in 'Animal Farm', where everyone is equal but some are more equal than others.
We also want to promote dialogue at international level, especially between the European Union and the countries with which we have fisheries agreements. Our strategy for worldwide fisheries includes an action plan to combat illegal fishing, better assessment of the stocks available to EU ships outside EU waters and an integrated policy concept for partnerships in fisheries.
So, in summary, our first reform package contains our future objectives and our reform proposals on stock conservation, on integrating environmental objectives into fisheries policy, on fleet policy, on fisheries inspections and on combating illegal fishing. We shall soon come forward with further proposals and reports on the conservation of stocks in the Mediterranean, fishing outside EU waters, monitoring of fisheries, aquaculture, the integration of economic factors into fisheries policy and the restructuring of the fleet in coastal areas. According to our timetable, we should be ready to start implementing measures by 1 January 2003.
If we have the courage to take responsible decisions, there is hope: hope for sustainable fisheries, for balanced ecosystems, for greater independence for the sector and for economic and social stability in our coastal regions, which is why I call on you to do everything you can for fisheries reform. You can certainly count on my total commitment.
Now a brief word, if I may, on various articles which appeared in today's press, stating that Vice-President Palacio Vallelersundi disagrees with the fisheries reform. A number of other articles have also been published along the same lines. To my mind, this is regrettable. I should like to make it clear that it is perfectly normal for a Commissioner to write to a colleague in the run up to a decision, although the choice of words in this letter was unfortunate. I should like to make one thing clear: if we are going to talk about provocation, then the only provocation, to my mind, is not being in a position to overhaul the fisheries sector! So let us keep to the business of reform in hand, so that this sector and the people working in it can be assured of a future.
I have often been asked how it can have come to this. My answer is, because the system we have is wrong, which is why we need to change the system rather than trying to treat the symptoms. The future fisheries policy needs clear objectives. The outcome of the reform must be a new fisheries policy which ensures sustainable development ecologically, economically and socially. We need responsible fisheries and aquaculture which allow a healthy marine ecosystem. We need to build a successful and competitive sector which also serves the consumer. We must ensure that those who are particularly dependent on fisheries have a fair economic framework within which to work.
We also want to apply the principles of new governance within the new fisheries policy by guaranteeing openness and transparency in our measures, involving the sector itself, setting clear responsibilities, developing swift decision-making procedures and guaranteeing coherence with other policies. The best way of illustrating the extent of the reform is to compare current policy with future policy. Until now, the December Council has decided on TACs and quotas from one year to the next and year after year scientific recommendations have been watered down by compromise. What is more, the existing system has not been effective in preventing illegal catches and excessive by-catches of juvenile fish. We have predicated stock management and stock management controls on quotas, instead of establishing a clear and direct relationship between scientific assessment of the stocks and allowable fishing effort, which is so much easier to oversee.
We have been operating a fleet policy, the objectives of which have not brought about any noticeable reduction in capacity and the measures under which have been completely cancelled out by promoting vessel construction, instead of establishing a link between the stocks that suffer most from capacity pressure and the reductions needed in order to be able to give individual fishermen a reasonable level of fishing effort.
We have contributed to the current race between ever more efficient ships for fewer and fewer fish, with the result that income has declined, despite increasing prices for fish, and with the result that some 66 000 jobs have already been lost between 1991 and 1998. We boosted this trend by using financial support primarily to buy new, more efficient ships instead of on measures which would have encouraged the people concerned to do things differently. Finally, thanks to a system of widely varying controls and sanctions, what we have done, instead of making sure there was a level playing field is to create a climate of mistrust, so that today every fisherman thinks he is worse off than fishermen in neighbouring countries.
That is why we want to create a new coherent system which steers its own way towards the objectives set, rather than sucking them into a vortex. We have taken as our starting point the stocks in the sea which are generally fished in common. We shall have them scientifically assessed and shall draw up multiannual stock recovery and stock management plans as and where necessary. From these we shall be able to establish the level of fishing effort each of these stocks can tolerate and what technical measures need to be applied. In other words, in future we shall set ever smaller annual TACs and quotas and then determine how many boats may fish for how many days in certain zones and what nets they will be allowed to use.
This system is also much easier to control using VMS and can also be adapted year on year, depending on how stocks evolve. In places where there is overcapacity, fishermen who can no longer use their vessel to full capacity will have to ask themselves if it is more worthwhile for them to carry on fishing, leave the sector, have their vessel scrapped and retire or get retrained.
We must, though, stop using subsidies to entice fishermen into new investments without providing an economic environment which can sustain them. Instead, we want to use public funds to help give those leaving the sector a positive future, which will also improve opportunities for the vessel owners who remain in the sector.
In order to finance this concept, we need first and foremost to reprogramme the existing structural programmes. The Member States can no longer hide behind the argument that we would have to wait until 2006. Current regulations already provide the facility for reprogramming. We propose to use the funds previously used to export ships and for joint ventures for scrapping and, instead of supporting vessel renewal and creating artificial competition, to use the EUR 450 million for social measures. As far as we are concerned, it is vital that this money be spent on social measures in future because, according to our initial calculations, around 7 000 jobs a year could be scrapped due to restricted fishing efforts, in addition to the other jobs which will be lost this year anyway, one reason being the increasingly modern and less labour intensive techniques being used in the fisheries sector."@en1
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