The European Union agreed on Wednesday to maintain controversial fishing subsidies, sparking a sharp response from environmental groups who say the payments contribute to overfishing of already stressed stocks.<\/p>\n
After tough, drawn-out talks which went into the night, a draft statement said that ministers would keep subsidies for modernising fishing fleets through to 2017 as part of a wider policy to put the industry on a sustainable basis.<\/p>\n
The subsidies pay for modernising existing vessels or taking older boats out of the fleet and are jealously guarded by the main fishing powers — France, Portugal and especially Spain.<\/p>\n
Critics, however, say this only increases fishing capacity at a time when the focus should be on reducing the catch so as to allow stocks to recover.<\/p>\n
In June, the EU agreed a series of reforms, chief among them proposals to set so-called Maximum Sustainable Yields (MSY) — the maximum amount of fish that can be caught without compromising a stock’s ability to reproduce.<\/p>\n
Scientists say, for example, that 80 percent of Mediterranean stocks are overfished although the situation has improved in Atlantic waters.<\/p>\n
Combined, the EU counts as the world’s third biggest fishing power, making what it does a key marker for the global industry.<\/p>\n
The Greenpeace environmental group dismissed Wednesday’s accord under the headline “European ministers want to continue bankrolling overfishing.”<\/p>\n
It said EU ministers were “selling out to the short-term economic interests of the industrial fishing industry, instead of putting Europe’s fisheries onto a path of recovery.<\/p>\n
“Many parts of the EU fishing fleet are already able to catch two to three times more than is sustainable, but ministers … have signalled that they want to continue funnelling subsidies into the modernisation of vessels.”<\/p>\n
2012 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":27082,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[2901,2035,731,771],"region":[1916],"source":[1986],"country":[],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/36899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/36899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=36899"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=36899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}