Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-09-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20050609.5.4-014"2
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". – Mr President, I congratulate the rapporteur, Mrs Fraga Estévez, on her hard work on this legislation.
I wish to make some general comments. Fish, as everybody knows, is an important source of healthy human nutrition and is, quite rightly, much sought after by the consumer. It is also a major source of income for thousands of fishermen and other people involved in the fishing trade, including many small, medium and large businesses.
The seas provide this fish, but uncontrolled fishing practices will eventually diminish supply and kill off the fishing industry. It is thus imperative that measures to manage the sustainable exploitation of fishery resources are legislated for and implemented as soon as possible. This is especially so with respect to the Mediterranean Sea, where stocks of many fish species appear in many instances to be at threshold levels. That is why this legislation is so urgently needed.
However, legislation becomes significant not when it is approved on paper, but when it is implemented in practice. This is a major weakness, especially with respect to fishing. Observation, surveillance and action to ensure application of the rules is unfortunately inadequate in many, if not in most, cases.
Out there on the high seas, things are not as they should be. Gross violations are committed daily by those who bend the rules or just disregard them altogether. So the first point to be made is that much needs to be done to verify implementation of the legislation.
The second point concerns the scientific data available to us. This information is essential if we are to understand and properly assess, for example, fishing stocks, breeding grounds, migration patterns and catchment methods. Are our present scientific data reliable? Unfortunately, it would appear not. It is thus of the utmost importance to direct efforts at getting accurate fishing data, free not only from scientific error but also from external manipulation aimed at boosting personal profits rather than fish conservation.
Last but not least, I refer to the diminishing species of the small- and medium-sized fishing enterprises of the smaller Mediterranean Member States like my country, Cyprus. Already disadvantaged by being a small island at the periphery of the EU, half occupied by Turkish and British troops, Cyprus is now facing the very real threat of having its fishing industry completely destroyed. A few hundred fishermen who have been carrying on the centuries-old family tradition of fishing around their island are now facing annihilation by the bureaucratic and, it seems, heartless dragon of Brussels, acting in conjunction with faceless international commissions whose main concern is to satisfy the interests of the big multinational companies and powerful governments.
So vessels from all over the world fish freely around Cyprus, but the Cypriot fishermen cannot do so because they are being strangulated by ridiculously low quotas. Take tuna, for example. The EU has a quota allocation of about 18 000 tonnes per year and the Commission in its wisdom has, for some years, considered giving Cyprus a quota of just 5 to 10 tonnes, instead of the 500 to 1 000 tonnes needed. The Commission blames many factors, such as previous years undeclared or erroneous catchment statistics by the Cyprus authorities, but these are just excuses. The fishermen of Cyprus …"@en1
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