Europêche organised a meeting in the European Parliament on 24 May to discuss the economic impact of landing obligations and the discard ban.
It was hosted by Peter Van Dalen, member of the European Parliament, and scientists from across Europe spoke of their unanimous findings that the EU discard ban has worrying unforeseen consequences.
The EU discard ban was argued to have a severe economic impact on the fishing sector, in particular the negative effect of choke species.
Kathryn Stack, managing director of Europêche, said: “We have a situation where the quota allocation fails to deal with the complexity of mixed fisheries.
“Fish will remain uncaught, reducing food supply and vessels will either be tied up or have already gone bankrupt.”
Choke species are species for which the quota has been reached, meaning the vessel is prevented from returning to sea, which effectively ‘chokes’ the fishery.
The outcome of this choking situation is expected to bankrupt the fishing operations concerned.
“This is a serious situation, the flexibilities can of course alleviate in the short term and the fleet can try to moderate the effects with selectivity trails but inevitably some of the effects will remain,” said Ms Stack.
She added: “Something has to change to allow these fleets to continue fishing. A good starting point would be realistic uplifts in quota coupled with close monitoring and frequent choke analyses.”
If all assumptions given come true, Europêche predicts that by 2019 the UK whitefish fleet would be receiving just 28% of the revenue it achieved in 2013.
