EUobserver opinion: Opinion: Fragile depths

BRUSSELS - The deep seas are among the oceans’ least suitable areas for industrial fishing. In the dark waters below 400m, species typically live for many years, grow slowly, and have limited productivity.

They can sustain only very low levels of exploitation, and so can be quickly overfished. Their habitats, including vulnerable marine ecosystems such as sponges and millennia-old corals, can be easily damaged or permanently destroyed by fishing gear, such as bottom trawls that plough indiscriminately along the sea floor.

Despite these obvious environmental risks, fishing activities have increased in the world’s deep seas, particularly during the last few decades.

As fisheries have depleted traditional coastal stocks, vessels have headed further offshore and into deeper waters in pursuit of new resources. In the case of the EU, fishing has taken place at increasingly greater depths since 1950, with subsidies helping to fuel this drive. Many of these fisheries have followed a ‘boom-and-bust’ trend. EU landings of deep-sea species in the North-East Atlantic, which is the major area for its deep-sea fishing, peaked in 2001 at 95,000 tonnes and have since dropped to 35,000 tonnes.

Management in the North-East Atlantic has unfortunately failed to keep pace with this rapid expansion.

The EU’s ‘deep-sea access regime’, which establishes the conditions and requirements for these fisheries, dates to 2002. Partly reflecting the general lack of knowledge about the deep-sea, the regulation could best be described as ‘management in the dark.’

It applies to only 24 of roughly 100 species captured, establishes no prerequisites for vessels to be authorised to fish, and sets no criteria for fixing fishing opportunities. Management has instead relied heavily on limiting the fishing capacity of the fleet - with limits that the European Commission later identified as being too high to be effective.

The 2002 regulation is also badly outdated, lagging far behind major international advances that have since been made in deep-sea management and conservation. It does not reflect international commitments made by the EU in 2006 and 2009, under UN General Assembly Resolutions that call upon states to sustainably manage fish stocks and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems from destructive fishing.

It also sets weaker standards for ecosystem protection than exist under the 2008 EU legislation on fishing in the high seas, leaving Europe’s own deep-sea ecosystems more vulnerable to adverse fisheries impacts than those that lie beyond.

Not surprisingly, the outcomes of the deep-sea access regime have been dismal.

Of the 24 species covered, 18 are now prohibited for capture because they were heavily overfished or are at risk of becoming so. Only three species are thought to be in acceptable condition, and even this is true only of some stocks.

Damage to vulnerable marine ecosystems is on-going, with sobering reports from places such as the Rockall Bank, where scientific surveys found that trawling had already destroyed an area of corals that had been proposed for protection. Such high environmental costs are particularly difficult to justify given the limited contribution these fisheries make to the EU; in 2011, deep-sea species only accounted for 1% of all EU landings in the North-East Atlantic.

In 2012, five years after its formal review of the deep-sea access regime highlighted major failings, the European Commission finally released its proposal for a new regulation. It broadens the scope of management to include 54 species and lays out a wide array of measures, including a new system of authorising deep-sea fishing, requiring fishing opportunities to strictly follow scientific advice, and only permitting fishing in new areas if doing so will not damage vulnerable marine ecosystems.

The most controversial element of the proposal is the phase-out of directed fishing for deep-sea species with two types of fishing gear - bottom trawls and gillnets - which are known to capture particularly high levels of by-catch and to damage deep-sea ecosystems.

This significant measure would help to shift deep-sea fisheries toward lower impact, more selective alternatives, but has met with strong opposition from the fishing industry. The phase-out has thus regrettably been the sole point of debate within the Parliament’s Fisheries Committee, at the expense of other urgently needed changes, and has also been used as an excuse to delay the process by months. Similarly, the Council has not yet even begun to discuss the file, despite highlighting the issue as a priority for completion under its 18-month work programme.

Given the blatant need for real management of deep‐sea fisheries in the North‐East Atlantic, a knee-jerk, industry-driven reaction against the proposed phase-out should not be permitted to derail the entire process.

Deep-sea ecosystems in the North-East Atlantic have been lacking real, precautionary management for far too long to let this opportunity sink. The Fisheries Committee vote is currently scheduled for 4 November.

The writer is executive director of Oceana in Europe