Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-360"
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"en.20070905.25.3-360"2
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"Madam President, allow me to say, first of all, that today a Spanish fishing boat sank off the Andalusian coast and as a result three people died and five are currently missing. I ask Parliament to stand with the families in their sorrow and the desire for the missing sailors to be rescued.
I will now move on to the report that we are discussing today. The first thing that I would like to point out, as the Commission itself recognises and Parliament has stated on numerous occasions, is the clear failure of the Community fisheries management system, which over the many years it has been in existence has not ensured the sustainability of resources, and has done even less to support an efficient and profitable fisheries sector.
Paradoxically, the management system is the only one that was not a fundamental part of the major reforms of 2002 and, because of this, the Commission has to paper over the cracks here and there, dealing with unsustainable discards, inventing control measures day after day and establishing recovery plans, but without tackling the substantive issue: establishing a coherent and up to date framework for the fisheries management model.
This is the context in which we have received the Commission communication, which opts for maximum sustainable yield as the yardstick for long-term fishing activities, a theoretical model that seeks to combine the most efficient exploitation of a species with guaranteeing biological sustainability. The problem is that maximum sustainable yield, which, as an intellectual and theoretical concept may be irreproachable, has been found to have more than a few contradictions in its practical application, and, in fact, a large proportion of the scientific community now considers it to have been largely superseded.
The issue is therefore one of redefining the model in such a way that it can be adapted to the reality of fishing communities, This is where a series of questions arise as to how to do this, which the report that we are presenting today has sought to highlight, and which are not in any way answered in the Commission communication, which is very ambiguous and vague.
It is clear that here we are not criticising the Commission’s intention to impose a new management model, but its inability to explain to us how it is going to overcome the difficulties of putting it into practice and avoid the pitfalls that exist in the actual formulation of maximum sustainable yield. Among these, we know that maximum sustainable yield requires long series of reliable, accurate scientific data, while for the vast majority of species, it is not possible to have this degree of certainty.
Secondly, the model was created based on the exploitation of a single population, while the large majority of Community fisheries are multi-species, which means over- or under-fishing many of them, which is obviously contrary to the actual definition of maximum sustainable yield. It also does not work for pelagic species, and we also now know that other factors influence the status of populations, such as errors in recruitment or environmental factors, which may result in incorrect definitions of maximum sustainable yield.
What is certain is that strict application of maximum sustainable yield will, in the short term, result in a sometimes drastic reduction in fishing opportunities, and therefore in the activity, income and employment of the Community fleet.
Madam President, allow me to thank all my colleagues for their contributions and to request the adoption of a report by means of which the Committee on Fisheries wishes to call on the European Commission first to clear up all these uncertainties before forcing the introduction of a type of model for some species of great economic importance whose effectiveness is, for many fisheries, scientifically and economically questionable. The committee also wishes to call on the Commission to first seriously look at a clear fisheries management system, with an eco-system-based focus, and then to decide on how to adapt the reference points and the chosen model, whether this is based on MSY or something else. This should not be done - and I must stress this point - without first carrying out a social and economic analysis of the repercussions of implementing it and measures to counter its impact. All these questions are currently of great concern to our sectors and to us."@en1
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