Around 200 Greenpeace activists from 14 European countries blocked yesterday the seven entrances to the EU building in Brussels where the European Fisheries Council was due to meet to determine catch levels for 2008.
The activists constructed a wall in front of the building's main entrance bearing the message "Shut Down until Fish Stocks Recover."
Greenpeace denounces that the Council “has failed to ensure fishing sector profitability, environmental protection, sustainable management or the maintenance of fish stocks and it claims that is time for new management.
"The Fisheries Council has been an utter disaster for fisheries," said Greenpeace EU Marine Policy Advisor Saskia Richartz. "Unless changes are made and power is ceded to Europe's Environment Ministers, Europe's fisheries face a biodiversity and economic collapse."
The organization believes that future decisions on fishing activities in European seas should be subject to greater public scrutiny, and must include the following:
• Member States must create a network of large-scale marine reserves: highly protected areas off-limits to all extractive and destructive activities, including fishing. The network of reserves must be sufficiently large to sustain species and ecological processes over time. Research indicates that between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of sea area should be protected in this way. The deadline by which Member States had to complete such a network passed almost a decade ago, in 1998. Member States, however, have continued to reap short term fisheries benefits without complying with the Community's conservation laws;
• All total allowable catches must be set at or below the scientifically recommended levels. For all fish stocks outside safe biological limits, fishing pressure must be reduced to very low levels and should be increased slowly thereafter only when recovery is under way. All stocks should eventually be managed below their maximum sustainable yield; and
• Starting from next year, national allocation of the TACs, which must be set in accordance with the above rules, should be made conditional upon meeting EU marine conservation standards, and in particular rules on marine protected areas.
