Joint Debate,- Fisheries

Speech to Parliament                             Tuesday 11th Sept 2012

Joint Debate,-  Fisheries

With fish stocks in serious decline in Europe's rich fishing grounds the CFP is a failure. And yet these reports are laced with the same old Euro-speak,- regulation, restrictions, prohibit.

Before the CFP most European fishermen, unhampered by bureaucratic interference, had been fishing responsibly, looking after their own waters and therefore handing on viable fisheries down the generations.

But the EU destroyed this culture of care and so now we have rules about Total Permissible Catch and the wretched discard policy which has decimated stocks.

If you don't like lessons from the past then try the present. Norway and Iceland still record good catches and find many species spawning well. But then, they ban discards and other destructive EU measures which, as noted in these reports, have reduced EU fishing fleets.

The UK fishing fleet is barely half its former size and so much of the fish sold in the UK now comes from Iceland. What an indictment of the CFP

Derek Clark   MEP                                                     Strasbourg 11th Sept 2012