Deal agreed at EU Fish Council meeting – Fishupdate.com
Deal agreed at EU Fish Council meeting Published: 15 May, 2013
A deal agreed on Monday (15 May) at the European Union Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels has cleared the way for the final stage of the long overdue reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), says the Scottish Fishermens Federation (SFF).
Under the deal, which has still to be ratified by the European Parliament under the process of co-decision making, the Council of Ministers has agreed a mandate for those final negotiations to include a workable framework for a discards ban and, at the heart of the new CFP, a greater degree of regional control of fisheries.
Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the SFF, said: “We have yet to see the details, but with the political decision to ban discards already taken, we seem to have achieved a mostly common-sense position on its introduction, with the first phase postponed until 2015 and a certain amount of flexibility built into the rest of the programme.”