NORWAY is to introduce tough new rules which insists that all fish caught in its waters by vessels of whatever nationality must be landed at a proper fishing port.

Fish Update 14/08/2008

The development was announced yesterday by Norway's fisheries minister Ms Helga Pedersen who had just come from the Nor-Fishing Exhibition in Trondheim. Recently, two British trawlers were seen dumping fish inside the Norwegian territorial limits, almost certainly because they had no quota to allow them to land back in the UK.

Ms Pedersen said: 'I want a requirement that all fish that are caught in Norwegian waters, also by foreign vessels, must be taken to port, regardless of which final port is used.'

She added: 'We will introduce new requirements, for instance as a condition for obtaining licenses to fish, that vessels wishing to fish in Norwegian waters cannot discard valuable fish caught here. Moreover, in connection with the annual quota negotiations between EU and Norway this fall, we will demand further binding measures to reduce the discard of all joint stocks.

'Discard not only means a massive waste of food and potential income, it also leads to unrecorded catches, resulting in a poorer scientific basis for our management decisions.'

The minister almost certainly struck a cord with Scottish trawlermen in particular on EU discard policy when she said: 'I know that many EU fishermen are unhappy with the present situation, and genuinely regret that they are part of a regulatory regime that in some instances encourages discard of valuable resources.'

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