THE Nordic Council has strongly urged the EU Commission to ban fish discards and to guarantee that future fisheries policies are ecologically, economically and socially sustainable.

Every year European fishermen throw enormous quantities of fish back into the sea, and often the unwanted catch does not survive this harsh treatment. Discarding is reprehensible both from ethical, and from environmental and stock considerations. Therefore, in its comments to the reform of the EU fisheries policy, the Nordic Council strongly urges the EU Commission to base future catch regulations on different principles that the current ones.

The Nordic Council calls for the speeding up of initiatives to protect species and habitats, and for catch levels to be set in a way that helps to rebuild the overfished European stocks.

The Nordic countries have many good suggestions on how to solve the problems of the current EU fisheries policy. These include, apart from a ban on dumping, the establishment of a certain number of fishing days per boat, catch quotas, minimum fish sizes, as well as closing special important breeding areas at certain times.