Brussels, 17/06/2003 (Agence Europe) - In compliance with the obligations in a number of areas of the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform, the European Commission launched a public scoreboard on the internet which shows weaknesses in Member States' compliance with their obligations. It reveals that Spain, Denmark, the United Kingdom and France are the main parties affected by the infringement procedures. The majority of the infringement procedures concern overfishing (67 out 88). Most of the information in the scoreboard concerns Member States and it is therefore impossible to distinguish which Member States are the good or bad pupils in the class in respect to CFP rules.
The scoreboard on CFP compliance covers the three following areas:
- Fishing resources management: Member States accused of being late in sending the Commission reports on the quality of fish captured are Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece. Cases of over fishing in 2001-2002 - France overshot 13 of these fish quotas (out of a total of 106 stocks in 2001 and 108 in 2002), Denmark 9 (out of 90 in 2001 and 97 in 2002), Sweden 7 out of (74 in 2001 and 62 in 2002 and the Netherlands, 6 (out of 51 stocks in 2001 and 48 in 2002). In 2002, the overshooting of quotas varied between just 0.01% for Atlantic herring by France to 65.26% for sole by Belgium (in the latter, this was a very low quota attributed to Belgium). It also appears that four Member States (France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal) have not communicated their data on fishing effort (product capacity of Member State boats multiplied by the fishing activity of the Member State) deployed in 2002, which, according to the Commission could lead infringement procedures.
- Fleet management: Italy, Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom are the Member States that have least complied with their obligations on the transmission of data on the current situation of their fleets. Data, which concerns, age, tonnage, power or length of boat, helps to provide information for the fishing boat Community information file Only Belgium and Finland, as they should, have measured the gross tonnage (GT)of their boats and replaced the former Gross Registered Tons (GRT). Italy and Portugal are in last place with regard to the communication of minimum data contained in the fishing licences (information on the shipowner, and place of construction).
Structural policy: Every year before 30 April, the commission has to have the reports on the use of public funds allocated to the different FIFG programmes (structural actions in fishing). In light of these reports, the Commission verified that the aid granted by the Member States in the framework of FIFG responded to the demands of structural funds (eligibility criteria, rate of co-funding etc). the compliance scoreboards have illustrated that the Commission received 32 out of the 49 reports is was awaiting. The 8 non-appeal reports involve Objective 1 situated in France, Austria and Portugal.