Oceana position paper on the proposed European Union policy to eliminate discards and reduce unwanted by-catches

• English version (PDF - 120 KB)
• Spanish version (PDF - 130 KB)

Millions of tonnes of marine organisms are dumped back into the sea each year worldwide from fishing fleets, mainly for purely economic considerations. These include non commercial species (invertebrates, fish, birds, mammals, turtles, etc.), even those that are threatened and protected, and also commercial species (such as juveniles or adults once fishing quotas have been reached).

Unfortunately, discarded animals have very little chance of survival, meaning they are simply removed from the sea, often without having the chance to reproduce or to completely fulfill their role in the marine community. This practice also has other indirect negative impacts on the ecosystem: it benefits opportunistic predatory species (some bird species for example that proliferate at the expense of many other species) and cause, when the level of rotting discards is large, serious problems for organisms living on the sea bottom.

This vast and unnecessary waste of living resources not only threatens the fate of marine ecosystems but also jeopardizes the future of fisheries. Indeed, discards practices hamper fisheries management. As discards are most of the time unreported or even unrecorded, quota policies are undermined as they refer only to landings and thus do not consider the sometimes huge amounts of over quota catches. Similarly, the reliability of stock assessments is weakened by the incomplete information used by scientists or officials to study catches.

The situation of many fisheries is already desperate. In European waters, many stocks, sometimes once considered as inexhaustible, collapse and thousands of fishermen lose their jobs each year. If irresponsible fishing goes on in the current trend, scientists warn that within decades there will be no commercially viable marine fisheries.

In this context, on 28 March 2007, the European Commission presented the Communication “A policy to reduce unwanted by-catches and eliminate discards in European Fisheries (COM(2007)136)” and an accompanying impact assessment (SEC(2007)380) to tackle this practice the European Commissioner for Fisheries defined as “a waste of precious marine resources”.

Oceana´s thinks that to reduce by-catch a set of measures based on a fishery by fishery approach is necessary. Oceana supports a discards ban, an improvement of gear selectivity, real-time area closures, the obligation to switch fishing grounds, etc. and proposes ideas to see that it is implemented efficiently.

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