New Fisheries Rule Creates Loophole That Undermines Control Regulation

The European Commission’s Control Regulation of 22 November 2023 is intended to tighten fisheries management by enforcing stricter catch reporting. To this end, Article 14, dealing with fishing logbook completion, encourages selectivity by including a Margin of Tolerance rule, requiring vessels to report catches accurately within 10% per species. Previously, the Margin of Tolerance—the allowed discrepancy between reported and actual catch—was calculated as a percentage of the total catch. This meant that as long as the overall weight was close to reality, species-specific errors were tolerated.

On 24 May 2024, the Commission adopted an Implementing Act, without consulting Advisory Councils, that provides “a derogation from the existing margin of tolerance that may be granted for unsorted landings from small pelagic fisheries, industrial fisheries, and tropical tuna purse seine fisheries”  in certain designated Listed Ports, thus weakening the rule and raising serious concerns about misreporting, fairness, compliance, and the potential for overfishing.

The Loophole: Exemptions for Listed Ports

Despite the stricter selectivity rule established in the Control Regulation, through the Implementing Act vessels landing at specially designated Listed Ports will receive a derogation, without any additional measures to ensure accurate species-level reporting. According to DG Mare, nine applications for Listed Port status have been submitted by Member States, but the locations remain unknown.

This exemption disproportionately benefits large vessels landing high-volume, low-value catches—particularly those in the fishmeal sector—allowing them to bypass stricter reporting requirements. This unfair system places other segments of the fleet at a competitive disadvantage and raises serious concerns about transparency and sustainability, highlighting the need for a level playing field in the industry.

A Repeat of the Landing Obligation Failure?

The situation bears striking similarities to the failed implementation of the Landing Obligation (LO), which was meant to eliminate the discarding of unwanted fish at sea. To encourage compliance, quotas were increased based on the assumption that all fish would be landed. However, in reality, enforcement was weak, and many vessels continued discarding fish, leading to artificially inflated quotas and worsening fish stock depletion.

A similar dynamic is at play with the new Margin of Tolerance rule. While the Commission assumes that Listed Ports will uphold a “gold standard” of monitoring—possibly through CCTV and other measures—there is little evidence to suggest this will be enforced effectively. Instead, the exemption will allow misreporting to continue unchecked.

A Call for Transparency and Accountability

The lack of transparency surrounding the Listed Ports exemption raises major concerns. Why are certain ports granted this status? What monitoring mechanisms are in place to ensure compliance? There are already considerable differences in sampling plans between Member States and without additional safeguards, this exemption threatens to undermine the very purpose of the new regulation, allowing industrial-scale operations to exploit the system while other fishers are left operating under stricter rules.

If the Commission is serious about improving fisheries control, it must address these inconsistencies. That means:

• Releasing the list of Listed Ports and the criteria used to select them.
• Ensuring additional safeguards are in place to prevent species misreporting.
• Enforcing mechanisms that aim to encourage selectivity rather than favour misreporting 

Without these measures, the new Margin of Tolerance rule risks being another well-intended but poorly executed regulation that ultimately fails to protect fish stocks and ensure a level playing field for all fishers.

Conclusion

The European Commission has taken one step forward with stricter catch reporting rules, but two steps back by creating an exemption that weakens its effectiveness. Rushing through a derogation aimed at vessels with vast, unsorted mixed catches just a number of months after the Control Regulation entered into force is difficult to understand, particularly in the context where advances in eDNA mean that we can accurately detail the species composition of these vessels at a fraction of the cost of other control methods. The Commission has however chosen to give preferential treatment to these vessels, even though they largely supply and export fishmeal to the non-EU market. 

Unless immediate action is taken to address this loophole, the regulation could repeat past mistakes by undermining accurate catch reporting, leading to further mismanagement of fish stocks and unfair advantages for large-scale industrial fishers. We advocate for greater transparency and enforcement to prevent historic errors from repeating themselves. 

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