Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-22-Speech-2-392"
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"en.20050222.21.2-392"2
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".
Mr President, firstly I would like to thank the Members for all their comments and remarks. I will group the interventions into four points.
First, the by-catch problem being a worldwide problem and the question of the Commission taking leadership. As I said in my original response, we are willing to do so but we have to have the necessary resources made available to us because this will be a mammoth task. We will be taking the matter up with the Council in the very short term.
With regard to the forthcoming FAO meeting, the Commission, as I said before, is ready to support the development of an international plan of action on by-catch and again we will seek Member States' agreement to convey this position to FAO and its members during the forthcoming Committee on Fisheries meeting, in particular when the work programme for the short and medium-term will be discussed. With regard to discards, we are actively considering this problem and hopefully we will be coming up with specific proposals soon.
Another point concerned declining fish stocks and by-catch being all the more regrettable as a result. Here I would like to say that one way in which the Commission tries to reduce discards is by improving selectivity by technical measures such as enforcing minimum mesh sizes or closed areas which can limit the catches of juveniles. Other measures such as the use of separator trawls or separator grids can reduce the by-catch of non-target species.
Well-applied technical measures can be effective but they are not without problems. For example, it is difficult to find the appropriate mesh size in mixed fisheries. The minimum mesh size needed to protect juvenile cod, for example, would be too big to catch adult haddock and whiting. Nevertheless technical measures have a part to play.
The Commission intends to revise completely the technical measures regulation in 2005 to follow up its communication on environmentally-friendly fishing. To deal with mixed fisheries the Commission tries to propose TACs to take into account associations between species. This is difficult to do but steps in this direction have already been taken. The Commission has asked ISIS to give its advice on a fisheries basis rather than on a single stock basis. These are the first steps in adopting an ecosystem approach to fisheries management.
Another approach advocated by the Commission is to manage the fisheries through effort control rather than rely on individual TACs. In principle it could be used instead of TACs, with fishermen allowed to land all catches, but in practice effort control will usually complement rather than replace TACs.
At the end of 2002 the Commission presented a discard action plan which discussed the problems of discards more fully and the ways in which the problem could be tackled. Following up this plan, the Commission will consult with Member States and the industry during 2005 with a view to initiating a number of pilot projects to eliminate or at least reduce discards in selected fisheries.
My final point concerning RACs is that they can be involved and certainly we find no problem in involving RACS in giving advice on the formulation of such plans."@en1
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