We ate all the fish from West Africa
EU funds European (mostly Spanish and Dutch) trawlers to fish in West African seas. It causes, overfishing and stock depletion, loss of food security and the damage of local economies.
European trawlers — funded with EU money — fish enormous amounts of fish in West African seas, up to 250 tons per day. This is possible because of Europe having Fishery Agreements with 8 countries in West Africa. The Chinese trawlers in West African waters take even more. It causes:
· A serious threat to food security of millions of West Africans (the sardinella fish is a cheap substitute for meat).
· Missed out income of 2.3 billion US dollars for fish-related business in the region.
So, after lobby of the local fishermen, Senegal changed its policies in 2006: foreign trawlers are now hardly allowed to fish in Senegalese waters, but for tuna. However:
· European trawlers start to fish under the Senegalese flag to be able to continue their practices.
· 40% of the catch is illegal (through weak enforcement of the law and corruption).
· Since tuna is hard to find, they fish for sarinella. A fish that Europeans don’t eat, because it is full of fish bones. So, it’s sold at the local market in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Toto, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. At lower prices than local fishermen.
Fair-fish sent us this valuable document with solutions to overfishing and stock depletion, loss of food security and the damage of local economies that the European Union can directly implement in their policies. In short:
1. The EU should not support the consumption of fish for health reasons. Omega 3 fatty acids can be sourced directly from where fish get it themselves, namely from algae.
2. EU subsidies and research funds for aquaculture will only be accorded to projects and farms which:
· feed importantly less wild fish than the fish they provide and
· keep their animals under species-appropriate living conditions.
3. European vessels do fish in EU territorial waters only.
If developing countries and emerging markets want to export fish to Europe, the EU encourages and enables them to catch and process it themselves. This way only local fishermen and fish factory workers will get the value added they deserve. In the same time this will offer incentives in Europe to take care of its own seafood resources.
To prevent redundant European vessels from continuing to operate in non-European waters under changed flags and under probably even less strict obligations, the capacity of European fleets must be reduced to the size appropriate to sustainable fishing in European waters.
To help developing countries to effectively protect and exploit their marine resources themselves, the EU provides aid and technical support for these countries to enable surveillance of their waters and fish stocks and for the careful transformation and distribution of the catch.
4. EU to ban fishing of overexploited stocks and endangered species such as Bluefin tuna and several shark species, as requested by many conservationist organisations, e. g. @IUCN.
5. EU to ban industrial fishing methods and gears such as bottom trawling.
6. Any EU fisheries support only fisheries with minimal standards of animal welfare and sustainability. Locally based artisanal fisheries which use small boats and gear will be favoured. It creates more job opportunities than industrial fisheries. Moreover, this way fishing can be socially and ecologically sustainable and ethically responsible.
7. EU to reduce the negative impacts on the welfare of the animals to an absolute minimum. In addition, the suffering must be numerically reduced by targeting bigger instead of smaller fish — and by reducing dramatically the feeding of fish meal and fish oil to farm animals.
8. Establishment of interlinked marine protected areas which cover at least 40 percent of European marine surface, requested by @Greenpeace.
Any fishing in these areas is authorized exclusively to local fishermen which apply extensive fishing methods, comply with species protection, closed season and quota and which actively support the monitoring of their area.
Fair Fish also adds to the problem of overfishing:
· The consumption of fish is excessive, or as the renowned marine biologist @Prof. Daniel Pauly puts it in the documentary «The End of the Line»: The fish did not just vanish like that — we simply ate it!
· Aquaculture does not solve the problem but rather intensifies it — as long as species are fed with more fish or fish meal than the quantity of fish on our plate.
· Until now the present Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of the European Union has dealt with fish as if it was a commodity like corn or sugar.
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