Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-10-21-Speech-4-076"
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"en.20101021.5.4-076"2
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"Mr President, before taking advice from any expert it is wise to examine their record to check that they are competent. The Integrated Maritime Policy report is partly the work of the Committee on Fisheries, so before buying into its grand schemes it is worthwhile taking a critical look at the European Union’s record on the management of the seas. Inevitably, this means assessing the situation in the former sovereign UK waters, secretly betrayed to European bureaucracy control in 1973, since nearly 70% of so-called ‘EU fishing stocks’ are actually British fishing stocks.
How have our fish and our fishermen fared under the common fisheries policy (CFP)? The figures tell us far more than all the fine words in this report. 88% of the EU’s stocks are overfished, against a global average of about 27%. 30% of our fish species are now officially outside safe biological limits, because there are too few adult fish left for normal reproduction. Under the CFP’s obscene quota system, nearly a million tonnes of fish are discarded dead into the North Sea alone every year. Meanwhile, the industrial hoovering-up of species such as sand eels has led to crashing populations of bird species such as puffins.
To Europe’s south, the picture is just as bad. West African fishermen, whose lifestyle had been sustained for generations, are being forced to switch to people trafficking because EU-registered vessels have helped fish their waters to extinction.
It is time for the EU to acknowledge that its record in maritime management is the worst in the entire world, a typical example of what is known as the tragedy of the commons – the phenomenon by which shared resources always get exploited ruthlessly, because anyone who exercises restraint is disadvantaged by the unscrupulous.
It is time to restore control of the seas and fishing grounds to the sovereign nations, whose track record has shown them fit to exercise such stewardship. In the case of the two-thirds of EU waters that the EU has fished to extinction, that means the British nation and British fishermen."@en1
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