Fishermen can reduce discards, trial reveals

THE amount of fish thrown overboard as “discards” can be dramatically reduced by a scheme in which fishermen must count all the fish they catch towards their quotas, a report suggested yesterday.

Under current rules, which govern fishing across EU countries, fishermen have quotas for certain fish, but can carry on fishing once the limits are reached as long as they do not bring any more of that species to shore.

As a result, tonnes of edible fish which exceed the quota are thrown back to sea as “discards”, which European Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki recently suggested accounted for as much as half the overall catch in some EU fisheries.