Member States of the European Union are about to decide how they will spend money under the next EU budget, including on ocean and fisheries.
Currently, a large part of the EU ocean budget is spent on supporting industrial fishing fleets, irrespective of their impact on the marine environment. Small-scale, artisanal fishing vessels, which represent 76% of the EU fleet, only get 20% of this money. The protection of our marine environment is also severely underfunded: for each billion of subsidies granted from the ocean budget, the EU only allocates 7% of it towards the protection and restoration of the ocean.
Member States are about to make things even worse and to allocate all of this funding to go towards the construction of new industrial fishing vessels and to the modernisation of existing ones, increasing fishing pressure on already depleted stocks (only 28% of Europe’s g-fish stocks are healthy).
But we can still change this: as your governments are now drafting their funding plans for the coming years (the National and Regional Partnership Plans or NRPPs), now is the perfect time to engage with your fisheries, environment and finance ministries and ask them to make sure that in their next NRPPs:
- Enough public money is allocated to support the designation and management of 30% of our seas as Marine Protected Areas and to restore our ocean;
- Public money goes in priority towards small-scale, low impact fishers and those who want to transition towards low-impact fishing techniques;
- No public money is used to support harmful fishing practices such as bottom-trawling or to increase fishing capacity on already depleted stocks.
Make your voice heard – share this video and write to your Ministers!
