Apostleship of Sea applauds new EU fisheries reform with reservation
Vatican City, 14 December 2013: The European Parliament this week approved a reform
package to the EU’s common fisheries policy to ensure that overfished seas can repopulate.
The
reforms which go into effect in January 2014, require European countries to set fishing
quotas and fishermen to respect a maximum sustainable yield. Fishermen, in other words,
will be allowed to catch no more of a particular species than it can reproduce.
The
Apostleship of the Sea, the Catholic Church’s world-wide advocacy network which ministers
to seafarers and their families, has expressed satisfaction with the new policies.
When Vatican Radio’s Tracey McClure spoke with the Development Director for the
Apostleship of the Sea’s office in the U.K., John Green, he said “over the last good
number of years, (we’ve been) running down the stocks in the oceans. 88% of the fish
in the Mediterranean for example, are over-fished and it just wasn’t sustainable.”
Stocks in the Atlantic Ocean, he said, have been over-fished by nearly 40%.
As
part of the new measures aiming to replenish fish stocks, the practice of catching
and discarding unwanted fish will gradually be banned.
“That’s throwing away
healthy fish back into the ocean - that was occurring just to comply with quotas.”
While this may seem like a good idea, Green says “often these fish are dead or dying
- some of them would be maimed and… the intention there was to play the system just
to bring back the quota you’re allowed to catch and other (fish), whether you could
or not, you’d just throw away.”
Sustainable fishing quotas will be established
by each country, says Green. “Behind this, the aim was to create conditions where
the European fishing fleet fishes sustainably and actually that will protect jobs
in the longer term.”
Green, however, is disappointed by the reform package’s
failure to ban deep-sea bottom trawling. These trawlers have giant nets that drag
the bottom of the ocean and “scoop up everything on the seabed. This has been criticized
by environmentalists for many years," Green stresses. "So it (meant) it wasn’t only
bringing in fish that wouldn’t be consumable, but it also (has been) destroying the
seabed, the very fragile ecosystems that are there, and also the very breeding grounds
for the fish to reproduce successfully.”Source: VR Eng