Despite dire warnings of rapidly dwindling European fish stocks and EU Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler’s call for a sea change in fishing policies, the five-day EU fisheries ministers meeting in Brussels ended up being a victory for the EU’s heavyweight fishing nations.

By Friday evening Spain, France, Portugal and Ireland, Greece and Italy who have been the most vocal critics of the EU’s drastic reduction of fishing quotas for the next year, managed to get the EU commission to revise its initial proposal from a 80 percent cut in cod stocks to 45 percent in the North Sea against the 2002 quota.

Meeting agrees on limited measures

This will be combined with compulsory cuts in the number of days vessels may spend at sea. In the case of North Sea cod, for example, this will be nine days every month.

Similar measures and a 45 percent quota cut will also apply to hake, whose stocks are also plummeting. The new guidelines will come into effect on a temporary basis from February 1 until a final recovery plan for both species comes into effect from July 2003.

The meeting also decided on phasing out public aid for building new shipping vessels from the end of 2004. Subsidies will also be trimmed and they would be conditional on member states cutting back more ships than are added to the fleet.

Fischler hails deal as success

Despite the compromise, EU Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler hailed the decision as a breakthrough. "We have succeeded today in doing something which has never been seen in the history of the EU, which is reform of the fisheries sector and the Common Fisheries Policy," he said.

"This decision was far from easy. It also means there will be a bitter pill to swallow in the short term. We want to bring cod back to an acceptable level," he said.

Cod sacrificied for sake of politics

But the EU deal is already being slammed by environmentalists, who think that the EU decision doesn’t take account of the serious extinction that several fish species face.

"This is the death penalty for cod. Cod has been sacrificed for the sake of political agreement," said Julian Scola at the European Fisheries Campaign of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

"What the EU is doing is to allow that cod could become commercially extinct," he told Reuters.

Germany says too little too late

Criticism has also poured in from Germany, who along with Sweden called for a total ban on cod fishing, citing evidence from scientists and environmentalists. They say the measures to save the fish is a case of too little too late.

They also back Fischler’s original radical proposals of imposing a 80 percent ban on fishing cod, scrapping 8,500 ships in the EU and supporting the training of unemployed fisherman in other professions.

German Agriculture Minister, Renate Künast of the Green party said that the present compromise reached by EU fisheries ministers wasn’t enough. "We need a clear signal to protect the cod," she said.

Germany had also proposed erecting a special protected zone in the North Sea to at least save the spawning grounds of fish. Künast also wanted to ban fishing in areas with large concentration of young fish, bur failed to push her recommendations through.

Dwindling fish stocks pose grave danger

Depleting fish stocks in European waters have long been a major concern.

According to the EU Commission, there were 90 percent more mature fish in EU waters in the early 1970s as compared to the late 1990s. Cod stocks in the North Sea have sunk by 65 percent in the last 20 years. Even hake stocks have depleted enormously.

The EU Commission says that commercial fishing by large vessels of increasingly young fish is the main reason for the rapidly dwindling fish stocks, which have not time to recover. Authorities in Brussels say that the fish stocks are being hunted by twice the amount of ships than is necessary.

In recent years, the ecological crisis has also had economic consequences. The EU Commission estimates that between 1990 and 1998, that about 66,000 jobs have been lost in the EU fishing industry.