News Blog

Britain will demand the right to catch more cod after the fishing industry warned that EU quotas are forcing crews to dump thousands of tonnes of dead fish into the sea.Environmentalists, however, have branded the idea "madness", saying it would endanger the recovery of cod stocks.Fishermen often catch large amount of fish such as cod by accident after exceeding their quotas.
Quotas strictly limit the amount of fish that each vessel can bring back to port, not the amount of fish they actually catch.

Often boats catch a species or size of fish which is not what they were targeting.They then have no choice but to dump the fish back into the sea, which leaves them struggling to make a living.The problem has been acknowledged by Joe Borg, the EU commissioner, but he said there was no clear solution.

However Jonathan Shaw, the Fisheries Minister, said this morning that stocks of cod had recovered enough to allow British fishermen to have their quotas increased.He said: "Throwing back good quality fish is heart-breaking, particularly for some of the hard-pressed fishermen."Why did we introduce discards in the first place? The reason that we did that is that we knew that stocks were going down."We have seen a recovery in cod in the North Sea in particular. That is good news and that's why we will pushing the commissioner in December for an increase."He added: "We are confident we have a position that is backed up by science - that's the crucial thing."

But environmentalists say increasing the quotas is exactly the wrong thing to do.Oliver Knowles, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: "We think it would be madness to increase the cod quotas to try to remedy this problem."The solution to over-fishing lies in a much more wholesale review of the fishing industry."If stocks of cod in the North Sea are returning then it is at its very earliest stage and one way to destroy that recovery is to send the fishing fleet back."UK vessels landed 614,000 tonnes of sea fish, including shellfish, in 2006, worth £610m, a 13 per cent reduction in quantity on 2005 but seven per cent up in value.The number of young cod in the North Sea has risen for a second year in a row, but the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas has called for a 50-per-cent cut on 2006 catch levels to sustain it.