A report on iUU fishing of Baltic Sea cod - Fisheries Secretariat

Was the Action Plan effective in the Baltic Sea?Within the Baltic Sea region, the European Commissionhas achieved the majority of the actionpoints set out in the Action Plan:• The Baltic Sea cod fishery has been identifiedas a key fishery on which to focus inspectionand surveillance effort;• A working group, formerly under the auspiciousof the IBSFC, has been used to coordinatecooperation;• Common priorities and benchmarks for inspectionand surveillance for all the Baltic SeaMember States have been adopted;• The Commission has undertaken evaluationof a variety of control and inspection activities;• The Commission provides regular feedbackof inspection information to national controlexperts;• A compliance scoreboard has been publishedannually since 2003;• Pilot projects have been funded and areexpected to result in new applications in thenear future;• Review of third party complaints through thedevelopment of the Baltic Sea RAC;• Member State coordinators have been appointedto ensure improvement in requests forinformation from other Member States; and• Member States are increasingly exchanginginspectors and the Commission is helpingprovide funds for this process.The Commission has made limited or no progresson:• Achieving common inspection protocol orcriteria;• Reviewing operational communication procedures;and• Drafting a code of conduct for inspection.The Commission should be given credit forachieving so much within a relatively short spaceof time and with the limited resources it has atits disposal. In discussion with Commission staff,the “fall out” from the CFP reform has providedthem with a significant task and was furtheradded to by unrealistic political gestures andcommitments made by some senior staff whowere buoyed up by the fact that they were leavingafter the CFP reform – and so would not bearound to deal with the consequences.Furthermore, within the post-CFP reform phase,the accession of four new Member States withinthe Baltic has provided the Commission withanother significant increase in workload. If it hadnot been for the fact that the IBSFC provided afocal point and structure which the Commissioncould adopt and mould into a form that suited it,then it seems likely that the Commission wouldhave had serious difficulties in achieving what ithas. In some instances, the accession process mayhave benefited the speed with which the ActionPlan has been implemented owing to the requirementof new Member States to meet the AcquisCommunautaire, i.e. the body of legislationcandidate countries must adopt before joiningthe EU. The near coincidence of their joining andthe implementation of the reformed CFP mayhave provided for a more rapid adoption by newMember States of some new working practices.While the Commission may have been able toput in place the majority of the actions it had intended,the real “litmus test” is to assess whetherthey have been effective or not, and also to considerthe consequences of those actions that werenot fully implemented.There has been no official assessment of the ActionPlan. During the course of the study, however,representatives from the Commission wereasked their opinion on how effective the ActionPlan had been in achieving its aims.There was a general feeling that cooperationhad improved and overall there was much bettercoordination. However, some of the newMember States were still finding it hard to meetall the basic requirements, mainly as a result ofresource constraints. Some of the other MemberStates were facing cutbacks or caps on resourcesand so, as with any system that was being askedto do something different but with the same orless resources, progress was slower than mighthave been hoped. It was also pointed out thatthe outcome of the Commission’s 2005 evaluationof how Member States implemented thetechnical and control measures set out in AnnexIII of Council Regulation 52/2006 will provideclear indicators as to a number of the key aspectsof the Action Plan (see page 40). The ComplianceScoreboard was also considered to providesome indication of how Member States werecomplying with requirements of the Action Plan,although it was recognised that there were some– 29 –