Fiona Harvey in the Guardian (UK): Proposals to give European Union member states a greater say
over how their fisheries are managed moved a step closer to acceptance on
Friday, as part of a wider package of reforms that represent the biggest
shakeup of the fishing industry in decades.
The meeting of the EU Fisheries Council in Luxemburg
concluded without major upset, giving ministers the chance to concentrate in
future meetings on the more controversial components of the package, such as
the proposal to ban the wasteful practice of discarding edible fish at sea.
Giving member states greater powers over how to manage their
fisheries is broadly popular with national governments. It could help to defuse
tension over how the total catch in the EU's fisheries should be divided into
quotas for each country.
Richard Benyon, the UK fisheries minister, said the meeting
had made "progress, but there's still a long way to go" on the full
package of measures.
He said: "We are in favour of greater localisation
because it will lead to better management of fisheries – the situation in the
western Mediterranean, for instance, is very different to that in the North
Sea, and the centralisation of powers in the hands of the European Commission
does not always reflect that."...
A mackerel caught in the Belgian part of the North Sea, shot by Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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