With just two days until Maria Damanaki officially presents her proposals for reform of the Europe Union’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), we’ve now reached the critical stage where the EU Fisheries Commissioner needs all the supporters of her fisheries management overhaul to weigh in with the political backing she’s been hard soliciting.
Certainly in recent months it’s become apparent the commissioner’s wish list of proposals doesn’t have the necessary volume of support to make their passing anything close to a walk in the park.
In the run in to this point, the still-unofficial proposals have won many friends in several important places, but there’s been no escaping the fact there are some big countries in the EU that are skeptical about policies contained in the reform package. Meanwhile, the die-hard backers of Damanaki’s reform plan have estimated their number to include only about one-third of the EU’s Members of European Parliament (MEPs).
It is, however, as Damanaki describes, it “now or never,” because on Wednesday 13 July she will release her reform proposals for implementation in 2013. They will then be discussed for the first time in the EU Council of Ministers on Tuesday 19 July with further negotiations, then continuing virtually up to the point that they are introduced.
But even the poster-child promise of ending the controversial practice of member state fishing boats discarding dead fish at sea brings with it divided opinion.
For example, UK Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon, an ardent supporter of Damanaki’s reforms, said last week that the UK government wants to see an end to discards but added he “could only live with a discard ban provided it’s practical in how it is delivered.”
Benyon said: “The words ‘discard’ and ‘ban’ would satisfy most of the 650,000 people who signed the Fish Fight petition campaign — they would say ‘job done,’ but we don’t want to achieve a system whereby we’ll be putting good fish in landfill because we can’t throw them overboard at sea.”
What the minister and his department have discovered through new data and near-endless reform debate is that the discard problem is as much of a supply chain issue and the need to create markets for these currently undesired species as it is about a broken European policy.
It’s therefore widely suspected that on unveiling the CFP proposals and in order to keep the reforms’ supporters united, Damanaki will say there needs to be ban on discards, but she won’t give too much detail as to how this will be achieved.
One senses the commissioner is being pulled in a number of directions, and she has remarked before about there being legal constraints that may hinder her from going as far with the proposals as she might have wanted. It should also be noted there are EU countries that are in favor of the current, decrepit CFP system while some other nations’ politicians would clearly like to keep some overriding control on such an important area as fisheries management.
“The negotiation rounds will be massively political events with many politicians going along to fight for their own sector interests,” Benyon confirmed. “This is why we are hoping for more of a decentralized, long-term management plan because that takes power away from such politicians.”
But the minister remains confident of a sensible package of proposals and said he doesn’t want to go into the forthcoming negotiations thinking there will be anything less than serious reform.
“We’ve had all the indications that [the proposals are] going to favor our end of the spectrum and our desire for wholesale reform. I think we will get movement in a number of directions and I’m really hopeful there will be good words in the document about discards, regionalization and an end to the micro-management from Brussels,” he said.
Under the present CFP and inducing much consternation, the EU has set down a raft of blanket rules and regulations in huge detail about how member states should regulate fisheries — this despite the Mediterranean Sea being very different from the Baltic Sea and the North Sea being very different to the Irish Sea, for example.
The UK, like many other coastal states (but certainly not all), wants to simplify this and decentralize the decision-making process. And Benyon said that on paper it looks as though the commission is pro-regional management, but that he feels the finer details of this change will be incredibly important.
“I think the sticking points will come in the detail,” he said.
A month ago at the high-level GLOBE World Oceans Day Forum in London, Damanaki revealed that off the back of some high-profile policy defeats she was prepared to be flexible with her CFP proposals, yet she had drawn “red lines” that she would not allow to be crossed.
There is a clear indication that in the months to come there will be some dilution of Damanaki’s reforms and her red line resolutions will surely be put to the test. But just how much watering down will be required, and how recognizable 2013’s finalized CFP will be when compared with this Wednesday’s original document remains to be seen.
