Bertie Armstrong: Cuts to size of the Scottish fleet are completely unacceptable

Published on Wednesday 13 July 2011 16:10

WE ALL agree that the Common Fisheries Policy needs reforming and we all agree that we want a sustainable fishery.

But whilst there are some elements in the proposals that are a step in the right direction, there are other parts that are extremely worrying and could pose a serious threat to the future prospects of the Scottish fishing fleet.

The European Commission's own impact assessment of the current proposals, if they were implemented in their unmodified form, is that they would result in a 20 per cent downturn in the size of the Scottish fishing fleet and numbers of people employed in the industry - that is completely unacceptable and why it is essential that some elements of these proposals must be revised over the coming months.

We are also dismayed at the proposal to phase out discarding. Scottish fishermen abhor discarding, but in the complex mixed fisheries that our fleet operates in, it is totally impracticable to ban discards altogether.

A strict discard ban which ignores the regulations that are underlying discarding will mean a reduction in the fleet. There is no other way of doing it. A ban will just lead to a downturn in fleet numbers unnecessarily.

There is a huge amount of work to be done in the coming months to ensure that the most detrimental and impracticable parts of the proposals are headed off.

• Bertie Armstrong is chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation