Advice and Recommendations

2nd revision of a previously proposed rebuilding plan for herring in ICES area VIaSouth and VIIb,c.

The Pelagic RAC advises on fishing opportunities in 2014 for the following stocks: blue whiting, western horse mackerel, North Sea horse mackerel, southern horse mackerel and boarfish

The Pelagic RAC advises on fishing opportunities in 2014 for the following stocks: North Sea herring, Western Baltic spring spawning herring, Atlanto-Scandian herring, herring in ICES area VIaSouth and VIIb,c and Northeast Atlantic mackerel.

The Pelagic RAC recommends that funding for data collection under the EMFF will not be decreased compared to the Commission’s initial proposal and that Member States receive more flexibility to shift additional funding to data collection.

The Pelagic RAC strongly recommends that the Member States form a group dealing exclusively with pelagic fisheries rather than splitting up the pelagic stocks into different regional groupings.

The Pelagic RAC recommends flexibility regarding the absolute number of representatives in the Executive Committee of the future Pelagic Advisory Council.

The 2014 TAC for boarfish in the Northeast Atlantic is still listed as a precautionary TAC although ICES has changed its assessment method and therefore no longer provides advice based on the data limited approach. Contrary, boarfish has since September 2013 been considered a category 1 stock with a full analytical assessment.

In this document the Pelagic AC provides recommendations regarding the implementation of the EU landing obligation for the thirteen pelagic stocks under its remit.

Each year the European Commission publishes a communication paper to the European Parliament and to the Council regarding strategies for setting fishing opportunities in the following year. The Pelagic AC has been invited to comment on this communication paper.

The European Commission has recently proposed a full ban on drift net fisheries. However, the Pelagic AC argues that a blanket ban on drift nets is contrary to the objectives of the new CFP, which promotes bottom-up approaches through regionalisation. Rather than banning all drift net fisheries, some of which are MSC certified, a thorough control regime should me implemented to detect and strongly penalize illegal drift net activities and lack of compliance.