The European Parliament's Committee on Fisheries voted on Monday to ask for a targeted revision of the European Union's plan for bottom-trawl fisheries in the western Mediterranean, including a ceiling on how fast fishing days may be cut.
The own-initiative report, drafted by the rapporteur Carmen Crespo Díaz, was adopted by 21 votes to four with no abstentions. It is not binding.
It asks the European Commission to bring forward a legislative proposal amending Regulation (EU) 2019/1022 by 1 December. Until that happens, the existing plan remains in force.
The central request is a 20 per cent cap on annual reductions in fishing days. The cap would remain contingent on the best available scientific advice and would take account of profitability thresholds for individual fleet segments.
The committee also proposes allowing up to 10 per cent of unused fishing effort to be carried over from one calendar year into the next.
A further request would stop effort in mixed fisheries being set solely by the most vulnerable stock, and would have decision-making take account of business viability and food security as well as employment and fishers' incomes.
For red shrimp, the committee calls for the quota to be removed while the limits on fishing days are retained.
On controls, it wants the European Fisheries Control Agency to strengthen its monitoring of non-EU-flagged fleets, and tighter import checks on products associated with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
The committee noted that of the 20 stocks in the latest assessment, only 13 could be analytically assessed.
The plan dates from 2019 and covers demersal fisheries off France, Italy and Spain. The committee said trawling effort fell by more than 40 per cent between 2020 and 2024. In December 2025 the Council of the EU held trawler effort for 2026 at the 2025 level.
The president of Europêche, Javier Garat, welcomed the vote. "The plan's current framework and implementation have contributed to declining employment in the sector," he said.
The structure of the request repays a careful reading. The cap is not a limit on fishing. It is a limit on the reduction of fishing, which makes it the first instrument in the plan designed to protect the fleet from the plan.
Its arithmetic is sound in a way the sea may struggle to follow. A 20 per cent annual ceiling on cuts means effort can always be reduced and can never be reduced quickly. Improvement in the stocks is therefore guaranteed, at a rate agreed in Brussels rather than one chosen by the fish.
The carry-over is the more elegant provision. Up to a tenth of the fishing days a fleet did not use may be moved into the following year, which turns an unfished day into an asset. A day nobody spent at sea is no longer a day of rest for a stock. It is a deposit.
The proposal to stop effort being set by the most vulnerable stock completes the system. At present the weakest population in a mixed fishery sets the limit for all of them, which gives the species in the most trouble an effective veto. Removing that moves the decision towards the middle of the distribution, where the healthier stocks are.
This newspaper notes that 13 of the 20 stocks could be analytically assessed. The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked which of the remaining seven is the most vulnerable, and whether, under the new method, the answer is required.