The EU’s common fisheries policy: the case for reform, not abolition By Aurore Wanlin
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URING THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION campaign, political parties have found the EU’s common fisheries policy (CFP) a temptingly soft target. The Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, pledges that if elected he would 1 Tony Blair, Foreword to pull Britain out of the CFP, a Strategy Unit report, ‘Net policy that he claims has “totally failed British fishermen”. Prime benefits: a sustainable Minister Tony Blair, on the other future and profitable hand, wants the UK to “give a future for UK fishing’, March 2004. lead in reforming the Common Fisheries Policy”.1 Fishing generates a lot of political heat for two reasons. First, fishing is a more significant industry than most people realise. The EU is the world’s largest market for processed fish products and farmed fish such as salmon, trout and shellfish. In 1998, the whole sector – from 2 OECD, ‘The cost of fishing to marketing – was worth managing fisheries’, over S20 billion, or 0.28 per cent 2003. of EU GDP.2 The European 3 http://europa.eu.int/ Commission has calculated that comm/fisheries/doc_et_ at least 12,000 people work as publ/factsheets/facts/en/ fishermen in the UK and 260,000 pcp2_1.htm. people across the EU.3 Second, fishing, like farming, is an emotive and politically sensitive issue – making it difficult to push through necessary, but painful, reforms such as reducing the size of European fishing fleets. Fishing is often concentrated in remote areas where there are few alternative sources of work available. In some regions of Scotland or along the Atlantic coast of Spain, nearly a quarter of the population is employed in the fishing industry. Third, the debate about the EU’s fisheries policy is conducted against the background of rapid decline in Europe’s fishing sector.
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EU governments established a common fisheries policy in 1983, in an effort to address issues like overfishing and declining profits. The CFP was supposed to find common solutions to problems that could not be solved solely at the national level. However, the CFP has not lived up to its objectives. From the start, it has suffered from tension between its two main goals: guaranteeing the sustainable development of European fish stocks and providing social support to fishermen. As a result, the EU has failed to set quotas at levels that would ensure the long-term survival of threatened fish stocks. Fishermen have also been reluctant to lend their support to the CFP, thereby undermining the effectiveness of its rules. They particularly resent ‘quota-hoppers’ – foreign-owned boats that register in, say, the UK, and use British fishing quotas. They often feel that these ‘foreigners’ are stealing ‘their’ quotas. Politicians have tried to respond to such sentiments. For instance, in 1997 both John Major, then British prime minister, and his successor Tony Blair, threatened to block the EU’s Amsterdam Treaty unless EU governments found a way of ending quota-hopping. The EU has made repeated attempts at reforming the CFP, but has so far only partially addressed its weaknesses. The most recent reforms, in 2002, included several sensible steps such as simplifying rules to reduce the size of Europe’s fishing fleets. But the CFP requires a more fundamental overhaul, or else its weaknesses will play into the hands of those who want to scrap the policy altogether. Such a radical step would be wrong. As this policy brief argues, the EU needs a common fisheries policy. There
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