Festival of Northern Fishing Traditions 2018
Tornio, Finland: 150 Small-Scale and Indigenous Fishermen join forces
to address common challenges
We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.
The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ...
Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.
Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.
Warsaw, 11th December 2017
Marcin Ruciński
LIFE noted that the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (HaV) has now allocated extra 150 tons of Western cod quota to trawlers (on top of 120 tons allocated in October). This happened when the utilization rate in the passive gear (i.e. mostly small-scale) segment is now at 96%, and the utilization rate in the trawl segment is a meagre 16% (official data).
It is clear from the ICES advice and discussions within the Baltic Sea Advisory Council and elsewhere, that selectivity of currently used trawls is very far from OK, leading to i.a. increased illegal cod discards. We thus fear that allowing extra trawls’ fishing effort will result in twice as many dead fish in the water, including lots of juveniles. We very much hope that the HaV, through intensive at-sea inspections, will make sure this will not happen. If they do not, the very much hoped-for recovery of Western Baltic cod stock might be put at risk.
This quota should thus have been left where it was originally allocated – with the small-scale, low impact cod fishery segment in Sweden, using passive gears in the most sustainable way. Our fleet segment has been heavily weakened by low quota allocations in the past, difficult markets and the high impact of increasing grey seal population. Still, it shows resilience and strength by using the allocation at their disposal. HaV, alongside other interested authorities and organizations in Sweden, must strengthen the passive gear segments to help their small-scale, low impact fishers survive and develop, thus supporting the coastal communities they work in. At LIFE, we simply fail to understand why the opposite is happening.
Having heard from a high-level HaV representative at the Simrishamn conference last month that the spectre of introducing ITQs in cod fishery segment is not an immediate prospect, we trust that this decision is not yet another example of “track record pumping” in the run-up to the crucially important initial ITQs allocation exercise, putting one fleet segment against the other. In any case, this unfortunate decision must not have any impact whatsoever on any future quota sharing between the segments of passive gears and trawlers.
♦ ♦ ♦