Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-20-Speech-1-215"
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"en.20081020.18.1-215"2
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"Mr President, first of all I would like to thank the honourable Members for the interesting debate which demonstrates the commitment of Parliament to the recovery of cod.
Indeed, Parliament’s report largely concurs with and supports the Commission proposal to make our current plan more flexible and effective and at the same time more comprehensive. As many of you have pointed out, cod has started to show some signs of improvement, and fishers will tell you that cod has returned to our seas.
However, it is a fact that this is attributable to one particular year class – the 2005 year class – now that the cod has matured to sizes whereby it is caught within our nets. We therefore need to be careful how to manage this, because if we reward this one particular year prematurely we will end up in a situation where the possible recovery of this stock will be lost. This has already happened twice in the last 15 years – once in the Irish Sea and once in the North Sea – where we took premature action rewarding a particular year class and ended up with a situation where we had to start again from scratch. It is therefore crucial that we act in a way whereby responsible management will tell us that we should do our utmost in order to reduce effort by various measures and various means, and at the same time see to it that discards of cod are reduced.
This can be done by means of results-based management which the cod recovery plan introduces, and I would encourage Member States to also work with us so that we will be able to have a cod recovery plan which will in time bring about a complete recovery of cod.
Having said that, I would like to say a word on discards in general because discards is not an issue which relates only to cod. Obviously we speak of cod because that is of particular relevance to the North Sea, but we have various other stocks of fish that are discarded, and this is a very sensitive issue around the European Union where public opinion is mounting in a very negative way. I am determined to tackle it, and I intend to revisit the whole issue because so far progress has been very slow. I think that we need to look at the picture in a much more general way so that we immediately begin with significant measures to curb discarding, and later on I will come back to you with proposals as to how we can effectively curb discarding in the North Sea. We are also discussing this with partners like Norway to see how we can take effective measures to reduce cod fishery effort, but at the same time introduce measures to reduce cod discards in particular, as well as tackling the problem of discards of other fish stocks.
Concerning the Celtic Sea, to which Mrs Doyle made reference, it is true that ICES says that the state of the stock is somewhat better than in the other seas. Having said that, however, they still maintain that the stock is in bad shape and needs to be recovered, which is why we have included it as part of the new cod recovery plan. It is nonetheless still in very bad shape. The fact that a TAC is set does not mean that the stock is in good shape because most of our fisheries are regarded as being fished above sustainable levels, and you set TACs which would be on a diminishing scale. When it is really bad then it would be a zero TAC. In the case of the Celtic Sea, the situation is somewhat better but still the state of this stock is far from good.
Concerning the point made on cod in the Baltic Sea, although this is not part of this cod recovery plan we did introduce a cod recovery plan in the Baltic Sea in 2007. This year, on the basis of ICES advice and probably not so much a result of the cod recovery plan itself but of the significant efforts made by Poland and by Polish fishers, the very bad situation for eastern cod has improved but the situation for western cod in the western Baltic has got worse. We will therefore have to take tougher measures for western Baltic cod, but can maybe take somewhat less tough measures for eastern cod."@en1
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