EAA and EFTTA PRESS RELEASE

On Wednesday, the European Commission unveiled its ambitious Green Paper on a future maritime policy, which aims to integrate strategies covering all marine-related activities in order to boost competitiveness and growth.
 
Recreational angling – fishing with rod and line for non-commercial purposes- fits perfectly well with all aspects of the rationale behind the Green Paper: sustainable development ‘to ensure mutual reinforcement of economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection.’
 
Therefore, it was a stunning surprise to find how little attention is paid to recreational angling in the Green Paper, and the aspect of our sport the Commission chose to focus on. In a very few sentences -written in rather polemic form- we are told on page 30, that:
 
‘One important relationship in the context of leisure activities is that between angling and fisheries. The European Anglers Alliance states that Europe has an estimated 8-10 million recreational anglers at sea with a related industry of € 8 to 10 billion. There seems little doubt that the value to the coastal economy of a fish caught by an angler exceeds the value of the same fish caught for commercial purposes by a fishing boat. On the other hand it is understandable that fishermen demand that restrictions on the taking of certain fish for conservation purposes are also applied to sport fishers, particularly when the latter use similar fishing gear to professional fishermen. These issues require further study and consideration.’
 
We find it a bit odd that the Commission feels obliged to use this ridiculously short angling chapter to express its understanding of commercial fishermen’s emotional claims. However, a more important point is that these few lines show that neither the Commission nor the commercial fishermen seem to have grasped that there are different kinds of recreational fishing and that recreational anglers are certainly not the ones using ‘similar fishing gear to professional fishermen’. Recreational fishermen using nets on the sea bed or from a boat and the recreational long liners are the ones who should be addressed in this regard, not anglers!
 
Arguably no other participative sport covers such a diversity of ages, interests and locations as does angling. In terms of numbers of participants, angling is among the biggest, if not the biggest, participative activity in a number of EU member states as well as in other states outside the EU. Recreational angling is capable of generating substantial economic activity for coastal communities in exchange for a very low take of the fish stocks. Angling also has a large and undeveloped potential for growth – crucial knowledge for some of these often rural and remote areas, which are dependent on the commercial fisheries sector. This sector is facing new constraints like Marine Protected Areas, which the EU seems determined to put in place because – as pointed out in the Green Paper- it ‘will help to safeguard biodiversity and to ensure the rapid transition to sustainable levels of fishing’.
 
With relatively little management effort Recreational Angling can take place in most Marine Protected Areas set in place to protect stocks from overfishing. Background document no. 11 for the Green Paper contains this information about fisheries in Sweden: ‘The landings from commercial fisheries were in 2004 around 250,000 tons, while the recreational fishery landed around 850 tons with nets and anglers took around 600 tons.’ In percentage terms this means that anglers’ share of the total fish take was as little as 0.24%!
 
Unfortunately, only Sweden carries out the regular socio-economic study needed on recreational angling (every fifth year). The EU should take steps to ensure that proper, comparable data on recreational angling is available from all EU member states. This would form the basis of a better informed debate and serve our politicians well when they make the tough decisions on priorities at a time when we’re seeing ‘increasing, and often conflicting, uses of the oceans’ – as the Green Paper points out!

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