ZAGREB, February 10, 2020 – The European Commission has decided to withdraw its draft measure that should have introduced quotas for small pelagic fish in the Adriatic Sea, and some of the credit for that goes to MEP Ruža Tomašić, the Zagreb-based daily Večernji List reported on Monday.
Ruža Tomašić was the European Parliament’s rapporteur for that matter in 2017 when she pushed for a report with draft amendments she sponsored which eventually changed the European Commission’s initial plan.
The new European Commission led by President Ursula von der Leyen has recently decided to withdraw the draft regulation about the small pelagic fish quota in the Adriatic Sea from the procedure. The reason for dropping the planned quotas is that the EC does not expect agreement on the issue.
In mid-November 2018, the European Parliament adopted a report which Croatian MEP Ruža Tomašić submitted on the Multiannual plan for small pelagic stocks in the Adriatic Sea and the fisheries exploiting those stocks, whereby measures for replenishing the stocks in the Adriatic are suggested, instead of the imposition of quotas for the catch as proposed by the European Commission, which would seriously affect the fishing industry in Croatia.
At that time, Tomašić explained that the imposed quota would have restricted the catch in the whole of the Adriatic Sea to 50,000 tonnes of small pelagic fish annually, whereas Croatia’s catch was about 60,000 tonnes and the amount in the region now stood at 100,000 tonnes. Another Croatian MEP, Ivan Jakovčić, endorsed Tomašić’s report and called on the EC to pursue a policy that would be beneficial to the Adriatic fishermen. He explained that the introduction of the quotas as proposed by the EC would have been detrimental to the blue growth in the Adriatic region.
Dubravka Šuica, who was also one Croatia’s 11 MEPs in 2018, reported that she supported Tomašić’s reports and that she had not endorsed the EC’s proposal for incorporating a set of measures into a multi-annual plan for the Adriatic Sea that would manage the fisheries in the Adriatic Sea based on the Biomass Escapement Strategy and a quota system.
Tomašić told the Večernji List daily on Monday that she was satisfied that there would be no prescribed quotas for small pelagic fish in the Adriatic.
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