Crucial step towards building a culture of compliance
Split, Croatia, November 10, 2023:– NGOs today commended the decision by Mediterranean states to create a sanction system that will empower the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) to take action against countries which continue overfishing or illegal fishing, calling it “a crucial step towards building a culture of compliance, which is essential to start rebuilding Mediterranean fish populations”.
New Measures Would Allow Authorities to tackle non-compliance and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing
Split, Croatia, November 6, 2023:– As officials from Mediterranean countries gather this week for the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) annual session in Croatia, NGOs are urging the adoption of a system of corrective measures that would allow the GFCM to tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and cases of non-compliance within its region – a call backed by a legal analysis published this week that shows that GFCM has the competency to impose such measures [1].
Ministers Meeting for MedFish4Ever High Level Conference on Mediterranean Protection in Malta
MedFish4Ever NGO Side Event to Present Findings – See Below
As fisheries ministers gather in Malta today for the high-level MedFish4Ever conference, NGOs called on them to end the illegal bottom trawling that is driving destruction of protected areas in the Mediterranean, by strengthening compliance and enforcement ahead of November’s General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) annual session in Croatia [1,2].
2 November 2022: Members of the Med Sea Alliance, a diverse coalition of NGOs, today launched a new data atlas which, for the first-time, maps areas permanently closed to bottom trawling across the Mediterranean and investigates illegal trawling in these areas.
The Atlas is an online tool that maps presumed and confirmed infringements of bottom trawling in areas where it is permanently banned to protect sensitive habitats and depleted fish stocks. The Atlas has been released ahead of the 45th meeting of the GFCM*, the fisheries management body responsible for the Mediterranean. During the period of January 2020 – December 2021, the Atlas recorded incidents of possible bottom trawling in 35 closed areas by 305 different apparent vessels across 9518 apparent days of fishing activity (based on Global Fishing Watch data¹) and 169 cases of confirmed infractions between 2018 and 2020, based on MedReAct research on media outlets and information released by national control authorities.
This week, ministers from all 164 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) failed once again to curb harmful fisheries subsidies that lead to overfishing at the 12th Ministerial Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. While Oceana says that eliminating harmful subsidies is the greatest single action that can be taken to protect the world’s oceans, the WTO has continually failed to reach a meaningful agreement since initially taking up the issue at the 2001 Doha Ministerial Conference. Since then, governments have spent over USD $400 billion globally on harmful fisheries subsidies, according to Oceana estimates.
Legalising misreporting of catches will threaten fisheries and undermine the EU’s credibility when pushing for sustainable fishing worldwide, write Steve Trent and Stella Nemecky
Three dead striped dolphins, two adult females and a juvenile male, were found off the southeast coast of Samos island. It is estimated that the strong winds carried them there from another part of the Aegean, after they had been drifting for at least three days. The Stranding Response team of the Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation arrived on site to investigate the causes of their death.
