Malta and the European Commission may agree on what the EU’s fisheries policy should lead to, but not necessarily on how to get there, Fisheries Minister George Pullicino insisted yesterday.
Mr Pullicino was speaking at a joint press conference with the Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Maria Damanaki, who visited Malta just days after the Commission submitted fresh plans to revise the EU’s fishing policy. These plans introduce the concept of maximum sustainable yields, through which fishing for certain species would be strictly controlled and possibly banned for some time to allow fish stocks to recover.
But Malta has not been too keen on these plans as they are, although Mr Pullicino insists that the government does agree, in principle, with a policy which aims to ensure that fishing remains sustainable. The government’s argument one repeated by Mr Pullicino yesterday is that fishermen from Malta and other Mediterranean EU states would be disadvantaged if the same restrictive quotas were not adopted by their North African neighbours.
He said that the concept of a maximum sustainable yield was an ambitious one, and insisted that Malta believed it should be more ambitious by ensuring non-EU countries follow suit.
North African countries share the same fishing stocks harvested by EU members, he noted, and imposing quotas on one group without imposing on the other was not environmentally viable. He added that the plan would also not be economically viable, as EU fisheries suffer while others exploit the situation.
The minister pointed out that Ms Damanaki was appreciative of the local situation during the talks, and in her own address, the commissioner pointed out that she believed that a level playing field was essential for a viable policy.
She said that agreements with non-EU states were a possibility, citing the setting up of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas as an example.
The bluefin tuna season which is set by ICCAT closed yesterday, and Ms Damanaki pointed out that enforcement had improved this year, although she added that the EU now had to control what entered fish farms. Malta’s own aquaculture sector is a significant producer of farmed tuna, which is mainly exported to Japan.
Standard Publications Ltd 2004