No throwing them back (Image: Imagestate - Impact Photos/Alamy)

This will create a splash. A much-praised ban on European fishing boats throwing unwanted catch overboard won’t save the continent’s fisheries, a report published this week says.

The revised Common Fisheries Policy, expected to come into force from 2014, will ban the practice of fishers discarding fish. They do it because the fish are unmarketable or to comply with European Union limits on how much of certain species can be landed at port. As much as half their catch can be thrown back, with very few fish surviving. The discards ban has gained widespread support.

But after examining market data and catch logs for UK North Sea trawlers, where a quarter of the fish netted are thrown back because they are too small or the wrong species, Harriet Condie of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK, and her colleagues conclude that banning discarding alone won’t help protect fish stocks. The unwanted fish would probably end up being sold as cheap fish meal for aquaculture, animal feed and even pet food. The ban will only work, she says, if it is combined with tough science-based quotas on total catches.


The report raises two questions, says UEA co-author Alastair Grant. First, will realistic catch quotas ever be imposed, especially since ministers have now devolved quota-setting to national governments? “We hope that promises of catch quotas will be delivered, but the devil is in the detail,” he says.

And second, how do you make sure fishers don’t carry on chucking unwanted fish over the side?

“We came very close to completely destroying the North Sea cod fishery and only a few cold years saved us,” Grant says. “But we are not yet out of danger.”

CCTV on ships could stop fishers chucking back unwanted fish, says Tom Catchpole of the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science in Lowestoft, UK.

Journal reference: Fisheries Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.fishres.2013.09.011