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| Hand's off our fish! |
A DUTCH trawler that operates out of Hull has acquired almost a fifth of England’s entire fishing quota. The 370ft Cornelis Vrolijk controls 18% of the permits allocated to England. It specialises in herring, mackerel and blue whiting. It means this one trawler — which has 457,166 quota units — has a greater allocation than the entire Cornish fishing fleet, which has 174,483 units for 92 vessels and fishing organisations.
Details of the extraordinary dominance of the Cornelis Vrolijk have emerged in a list of the vessels and companies that control Britain’s fishing quota of 8m units. England has nearly 2.5m. The Sunday Times has campaigned for the quota register to be published in full and last week, for the first time, it was put online by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
See Zembla - Wild West at Sea!
On board of the pelagic super-trawlers of the company Parlevliet and Van der Plas is 'fished by request'. An employee of the company tells ZEMBLA: 'It has already sold the fish, before it is caught anyway. If the fish does not have the height and weight as agreed, then the fish is thrown overboard. Dead.'
These are the kinds of boat we are talking about