Policy Brief: Year 1 of the Landing Obligation, key issues from the Baltic and Pelagic fisheries

A Landing Obligation (LO), or a requirement to land all catches of certain fish species, was introduced as part of the EU’s new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2014. This DiscardLess policy brief focuses on initial experiences with LO implementation in the Baltic and Pelagic fisheries. It summarises the discard plans in these fisheries, presents stakeholder experiences from interviews, meeting attendance and literature review and highlights emerging issues relevant to all fisheries where the LO is being implemented.

Background and main elements of the landing obligation.
In March 2007, the Commission published a communication recognising the serious problem of discarding in European fisheries. A public consultation was held and discarding was subsequently highlighted in the Commission’s Green Paper on CFP reform. While a discard ban received significant support, industry recommended instead that discard reduction should be planned, on a fisheries basis, through creating incentives to enhance selectivity.

An incident involving a UK trawler in Norwegian waters in 2008 generated public pressure to end discarding, which increased from August 2010 in response to a UK celebrity chef’s public campaign known as “Hugh’s Fish Fight”. In 2011 the Commission included an obligation to land catches of regulated species in its CFP reform proposal. The adopted CFP included a LO, which applied for Baltic and pelagic fisheries from January 2015.

The main elements of the LO are as follows:

Scope: The LO applies to all catches of species which are subjected to Total Allowable Catch (TAC) limits or, in the Mediterranean, to a minimum landing size (MLS). Species that are not subject to TACs or MLS can still be discarded.

Minimum conservation reference size (MCRS): The LO requires that fish under the MCRS are landed but prohibits their use for direct human consumption. Catches of all fish, including fish below the MCRS must be recorded and counted against quotas. 

Exemptions: The LO does not apply to species and fisheries with demonstrably high survival rates for discarded fish. Also up to 5% of the total catch of species may be discarded in cases where selectivity increases are difficult to achieve or where handling of unwanted catches creates disproportionate costs (de minimis exemptions).

Discard plans: In the absence of multiannual plans groups of member states organised at a regional level develop discard plans in consultation with advisory councils. These plans are submitted as “joint recommendations”, which detail the species to be included in the LO, at which times and also any exemptions. Following review of the joint recommendations by the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) the plans are adopted by the European Commission either in full or with amendments.

Quota flexibility The LO requires that fishermen have access to quotas to cover their catches or they have to cease fishing (see “choke species problem” below). Accordingly, there are rules that allow for conditional transfer of quota between years and between species.