NFFO President, Tony Delahunty said: “Without an appropriate catch limit or viable bycatch allowance, as night follows day, this measure will result in thousands of bass discarded dead next year. The Commission just doesn't seem to understand that bass will be caught as bycatch in gill nets, irrespective of what measures are adopted in December. This will not help to reduce fishing mortality on bass. But it will put the spotlight on discards and discard policy. And not in a good way. This is introducing regulatory generated discards at the same time the same is being phased out in other fisheries. It lacks consistency and it lacks sanity.”
“The measures that have been introduced in 2014, 2015 and 2016 have had a dramatic impact. Catches of bass have fallen dramatically. But rebuilding the biomass will take some time – it depends on some decent year classes coming through. This is a lesson that we learnt with North Sea cod. Steady rebuilding will get us there but avoiding discards should be a key part of the policy. Instead, the Commission has proposed a misguided and harmful measure – harmful to the fishermen who will have to discard a vitally important part of their catch and misguided because it will not affect fishing mortality one jot.”
“Working with fishermen on spatial and temporal measures to help the avoid catching undersized bass in the first place would deliver more than headline catching bans that are not with the paper they are written on.”
“The Commission’s blunt approach has already created a discard problem in the trawl fishery where any bass caught over 1% have to be discarded. The effective ban on landing bass from vessels using gill nets will just bring this nonsense to a new level. It will be highly damaging to the many small-scale fleets around the coast of the UK.”
Story courtesy of the NFFO website.