Wasted Fish: British Trawler Dumps 80% Of Catch To Take Advantage Of Quotas (VIDEO)

Wasted Fish: British Trawler Dumps 80% Of Catch To Take Advantage Of Quotas (VIDEO)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? A lot more in the case of the film we published today, showing a British trawler dumping five tonnes of perfectly good fish overboard.

The practice is legal, as the EU only sets quotas for fish landed at ports, not what is actually caught at sea. In this case, it appears the fishermen were discarding low-value small (but legal) fish in order to fill their quota with higher-value big fish.

To many this practice is simply insane. As is the annual bun-fight in December in Brussels when EU fisheries ministers set the quotas. First, they carefully consider the sustainable levels proposed by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, Europe's premier scientific body for fisheries research, and then override them in the name of political expediency.

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