Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-164"
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"en.20030618.12.3-164"2
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". – Mr President, when you look at the list of threats to marine biodiversity, overfishing is the first problem that is mentioned. The main environmental damage is caused by overfishing of depleted stocks of commercially valuable fish, not to mention damage to non-targeted species including fish and damage to the marine habitat such as coral beds.
When you actually look at the Commission's approach to the whole issue of fisheries over the last few years, you will see that the Commission in fact used to be the most progressive of the EU institutions, pushing very hard for conservation and reasonable management of fish stocks with, of course, the obvious exception of third-country agreements. But over the last year there have been a number of developments which actually cause me and many others to doubt the commitment of the Commission. Take, for example, the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy: despite all the fine words and the good proposals put forward by the Commission, it is clear, when you actually look at what has come out, that this is really a shadow of what was proposed. While there are some good possibilities in there, most of it basically requires an effort of political will on the part of Member States. One just has to look, for example, at the negotiations over cod and other TACs during the December meeting to see that there is no political will there.
It is interesting that the Swedish Commissioner is here. Take the recent decision by Sweden, seeking to bring in more conservation measures in relation to cod: they were prevented from doing that. This sends out a very bad signal. If a Member State is willing and progressive enough to take more stringent measures then surely it should be allowed to do that. It is a regrettable decision and it is also unjustifiable. Consider, too, a Member State's commitment in relation to the basic regulation which was reviewed last December: again, they took out the opportunity which was used by the Spanish in the past to ban driftnets. This possibility was removed and I cannot understand why.
We should also look at the issue of, for example, blue whiting. Over the past number of years the European Union has been doing the right thing by trying to convince other countries to be reasonable in relation to the kind of quotas they set for themselves. But if you look at what the Commission is actually doing now, it seems that it is changing its approach to this. It seems that it has basically decided to participate in the overfishing. It has indicated that it is going to abandon the idea of restraining other fishing countries and is going to dramatically increase the Union's own fishing activities. That contributes to the depletion of stocks.
There is a major contradiction in what the Commission is doing and I wish the Commission would revert to its previous approach of being extremely progressive on the conservation of fisheries. It should try to pull the Member States along, because the Member States are being dictated to by the industry. We are going to end up with a serious problem in relation to the marine environment. It is already there and we need to be a lot more progressive."@en1
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