Portugal’s minister for agriculture and fisheries, José Manuel Fernandes, is in Brussels today fighting Portugal’s corner as new TACs (total allowable catches) and quota are being decided for 2025. Just as cod fishing has ‘reopened’ off the Canadian coast after a 32 moratorium, he stresses elsewhere there are proposals that could see Portuguese fishing fleets ‘worse off’. One of these is a proposed cut in sea bream in Azorean waters. Fernandes stresses that the 35% cut proposed by the EU government is based on scientific data from 2021. It “does not reflect the recovery” of red seabream that has been observed in the meantime. “If it were to be decided solely based on scientific advice, an algorithm and artificial intelligence would dispense with those meetings, and the decision would be made based on an algorithm, without political intervention”, he added, clearly fixed on bringing reality to the fore.
Fishing quotas on line in new meeting in Brussels
Photo: Bruno Filipe Pires/Open Media Group
