Europe angles for a solution to dwindling fish stocks

As Jose Deza Castro steers his small, scruffy fishing boat out of the sheltered harbor here, he scarcely needs to look out of the window to find his way.

Not only has he has done this thousands of times before; can also count on a bank of computer screens just behind the wheel, flashing constantly changing information about his location, depth, and direction.

And when he lets his nets out, those screens will tell him exactly where to find the shoals of sardines and anchovies that he is hunting. The nets rarely come up empty.

"When I started going to sea we had none of this," Mr. Deza Castro says, gesturing with a work-scarred hand at the high-tech display on the bridge. "We fished only about three months a year, when the moon was right, and we followed our instincts to find the fish. Now we fish all year, and we know where the sardines are."

With fishing boats from Scotland to Portugal using the latest fish-finding devices, from sonar to spotter planes, many popular fish are nearing commercial extinction, experts warn. And they fear that European fisheries ministers, meeting this week in Brussels in a last-ditch effort to save the cod, may in fact sacrifice the fish's future to satisfy angry fishermen at home.

At stake, warned Franz Fischler, the European Union's agriculture and fisheries boss this week, is "the demise of some of our most important stocks, and with them the future of our fishing industry."

Without radical and immediate action to curb fishing in European waters, he warned, fishermen would suffer the same fate as their colleagues in Canada, who overfished the Grand Banks so badly that cod fishing has been banned there since 1992.

That would spell an end to one of the mainstays of European cuisine.

English fish and chips would never be the same again, and the Portuguese would lose their beloved national dish of bacalhau, orsalt cod.

The parlous state of cod stocks, Mr. Fischler said, is emblematic of "a failed fisheries policy, marked by years of excessive catch quotas, continued failure to heed scientists' warnings, industry overcapacity, the use of public money to maintain unsustainable levels of fishing pressure, and the failure to enforce proper controls."

But moves to reform the European Union's fisheries policy, under debate by ministers this week, have met with fierce resistance from fishermen.

"Our reaction to the EU proposals is completely negative," says Alain Parres, head of Europêche, the Europewide federation of fishermen's associations.

Mr. Parres maintains that "the current policies are fine; they just need to be better enforced."

Experts do not agree.

Fishermen in European Union waters caught only 70 percent of the cod they were entitled to in 2000, the experts point out, because they could not find any more, and stocks are below 20 percent of their potential.

Page: 1 | 2