European Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki on Thursday announced that she will take part in the launch of the European Fish Fight campaign.
Launching on 31 May at the Esplanade next to the European Parliament building in Brussels, the European Fish Fight campaign is an expansion of the campaign launched in the UK last October by celebrity chef High Fearnley-Whittingstall.
The campaign aims to raise public awareness of sustainable fishing and fish wastefully discarded at sea. As of Thursday, more than 675,000 people had signed a petition on the initiative’s website, www.fishfight.net, urging Damamaki to reduce discards as part of Common Fisheries Policy reform, which is due next year. Additionally, “Hugh’s Fish Fight,” which appeared on Britain’s Channel 4 in January, recently won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts 2011 award for best feature film.
“Fish Fight has a great power and I am grateful to the people who support it and understand that we can not go on with business as usual. This is not an option anymore, for the simple reason that fish stocks are decreasing, we need a real change — to fish less and earn more, and we can do that through a better management of our fish stocks and for instance avoiding discards,” said Damanaki. “I hope that Fish Fight public support will help to bring the radical change that we need.”
