From The Daily Telegraph

A complete ban on fishing for cod in the waters around Britain will be called for by international scientists in their advice to the EU published later this week.

The advice from the Copenhagen-based International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (Ices) is the same as it has given the EU for the last four years — and which ministers have ignored. But it has new force.

Ministers have given quotas for catching cod for each of those years on the assumption that stocks would rebound.

They have not and with each year the scientists ask for a ban their recommendation has greater authority.

The cod stock in the North Sea is about 50,000 tons – the size of a small commercial ship – though it was once more than four million tons.

In order to safely withstand disease and environmental disasters, scientists calculate that the stock should be more than 150,000 tons.

Technically, EU ministers are required to balance conservation with the needs of fishing communities.

The result is that every year Ices’s advice on the cod has been watered down to a cut in quota instead of a ban.

Last December ministers ignored the advice again and let fishermen catch the equivalent of half the remaining cod in the North Sea.

This year Ices’s gambit to persuade ministers to take its advice is to stress the indications of recovery that stocks that have been properly managed, such as the Norwegian spring spawning herring and the Northern hake which swims off the west of Britain and off Ireland have shown.

Martin Pastoors, the chairman of the advisory committee on fishery management, the group of scientists which advises EU ministers, said: “Unfortunately we have not seen clear signals of recovery for the depleted cod stocks. These stocks have a high growth potential, but the continued catches from these stocks in combination with very low recruitment have prevented a recovery.”

There are major problems in imposing a total ban on catches in what is called a mixed fishery — one where plentiful haddock and less plentiful whiting exist alongside cod — but these have not been grasped by EU ministers, though they have by Marks & Spencer which requires its fishermen to catch haddock in special nets which exclude cod.

Ices this year also recommends a ban on fishing for sand eels, some 750,000 tons of which used to be taken from the North Sea, after a collapse in the population last year.

It is also calling for a reduction in catches of plaice, which is overfished, to rebuild stocks to safe levels.

It wants also a reduction in the massive catches of blue whiting, the last fish in Europe plentiful enough to satisfy the increasing demand for more stocks of fish that can be turned into meal to feed farmed salmon.

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