The National Association of Longliner Owners (ANAPA) and the Provincial Association of Longliner Owners and Other Gear of Pontevedra (ARPOAN) expressed concern about the inaction of the European Commission (EC) over the current standard on shark finning onboard vessels.
“Despite repeated complaints addressed to the institutions of the European Union, nothing moves and the Community fisheries sector is still suffering the consequences of a wrong policy,” the two organizations say in a statement.
In addition, they presented a brief report in order to make it clear that there is a way to set fishing regulations intended to protect sharks.
To ARPOAN and ANAPA it is necessary to stop the shark finning practice and to stop harming the Community fishing fleets.
Last June, the two entities transmitted to the General Secretariat of Fisheries that in Brussels is working on a procedure to make a change in attached shark fin policies. They suggested, for example, that all the fins of a same body should be placed in a bag and then attach them to the shark.
The associations estimate that by means of this initiative it would be possible to ensure that the bodies are not dumped back into the sea, through a simple and easy sampling during the landings.
“In our view, the alternative to transfer the Community legislation on attached fins to the multilateral field of the Regional Fisheries Management Organisations for the South Pacific (RFMOs), as it has been shown, has already failed,” they state.
“Now it is time to change the political speech and move from convincing third parties of the benefits of the EU proposal to the option of internally seeking a reasonable solution to change the radical quality and negativity of the EU current regulation”, they add in the note.
ARPOAN and ANAPA consider that the Spanish political institutions and the fishing industry should perform all policies and management actions necessary for the implementation of the current policy fins attached to bodies to be more flexible.
“Given the social, economic and political consequences as well as the loss of competitiveness and of Community surface longline fleet units, the EU should accept the failure to achieve its normative multilateralism within the RFMOs and, consequently, modify the rules to adapt them to other countries like New Zealand, who are at least as environmentalists and the EU Member States but have managed to balance the positions of one or the others to reach the approval of rational measures that are compatible with the control of the prohibition on finning with social and economic interests of the companies that capture sharks,” they conclude.
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