Demand for firm stance on discards

EU fishing reform campaigners have urged the Government to stand firm on a blanket ban on dumping fish back in the sea, amid signs of differences at talks in Brussels.

Earlier this month, MEPs overwhelmingly backed the biggest-ever Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reforms, crucially including an end to “discards” – a consequence of current quota rules restricting the size of landed catches.

EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki – who once admitted the CFP was “broken” – said the discards system meant almost one-quarter of all fish caught in European waters was dumped.

But the CFP reform package is not a done deal and last night the question of discards triggered talks late into the night. The biggest resistance to reforms on the scale demanded by MEPs came from France, Portugal and Spain, who, according to Greenpeace, “still stubbornly oppose progress” despite “an increasingly stiff wind of change for an ambitious fisheries reform”.