Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we are once again holding – and once again at night – an important debate on the common fisheries policy, specifically on its external aspects, on what we could call the external fisheries policy, by which I mean the European Union’s participation in Regional Fisheries Organisations, which from now on I shall refer to as RFOs for short, and the renewal of a fisheries agreement with a third country, in this case Equatorial Guinea. I would firstly like to congratulate my fellow rapporteurs this evening, Mr Piétrasanta and Mr Gallagher, on the wonderful work they have done. To focus on the first of these aspects, the role of the European Union in the RFOs, in this case we are dealing with RFOs that regulate the populations of highly migratory species, that is, tuna and related species, such as swordfish. These are fish resources of the highest commercial value to which we must apply the utmost effort since they are of enormous economic importance, both to the Union and to third countries. I would also like to draw your attention to the Community decision-making procedure in this field. In committee we have introduced an amendment to the regulation on control measures, so that the Commission may present us with an annual report on the control and monitoring measures carried out within the scope of the RFOs in which the European Union participates. This report must include the provisions which are adopted by the management committee of the fisheries sector in implementation of the provisions of that regulation. The European Parliament is given very little information and, what is even more serious, there is a sense that these consultations with the European Parliament are useless, since we are consulted after the event, when the measures have already been adopted, thereby making a mockery of the role of the European Union’s principal democratic institution. We must change this system, Commissioner. We are already trying to do this de facto through the ICCAT meetings, a system which we must extend to all the other RFOs in which the European Union participates, and we hope there will be an increasing number of them. Our Committee on Fisheries wishes to have prior knowledge of the proposals the Commission is going to make in these fora. We want the Commission to discuss them with us and then put them forward, thereby fully involving the European Parliament in meetings which it is going to continue to participate in – or at least I hope so – as an observer, as it has been doing recently thanks to the code of conduct established between our institutions. I am not going to dwell on the enormous role which the RFOs are expected to play, on which our committee has already produced several reports. Please allow me to remind you, in this context, that we are producing an own-initiative report which is closely related to the RFOs: I am referring to the control of illegal fishing in international waters, to the report on ships flying flags of convenience, which is unfortunately also a frequent problem in the fishing grounds for highly migratory fish. The European Parliament wishes to participate, together with the FAO, in the definition of new notions, which are more precise and more developed, of undeclared and unregulated illegal fishing, of declarations of catches, of inspections at sea and in ports, of prohibitions of landings etc. for this irresponsible form of fishing. Commissioner, we have therefore also asked to attend the initial control and inspection meetings of the RFOs, and also those on criteria for allocating quotas, since they must be linked to those organisations, so that in the future one of the main criteria for allocation may be the real capacity for compliance with the control and inspection measures which these RFOs implement. It seems neither advisable nor reasonable that a State should increase its catch quotas if it does not have the means necessary for controlling them. In summary, we are happy with the Commission’s efforts to regroup the broad and diverse regulations referring to highly migratory fish, although these efforts present us with decisions that have already been adopted and which are binding at an international level because no objections have been raised against them. The Commission is, furthermore, only making these efforts in order to achieve greater legal certainty. However, we would like the European Parliament to participate more actively in the proposals which the Commission must put forward in these fora, communicating them to the Committee on Fisheries beforehand. Secondly, not only as rapporteur for these reports, but also, above all, in my capacity as current Chairman of this Parliament’s Committee on Fisheries, I must repeat here once again, Commissioner, our committee’s request, ratified by Parliament, for the administrative structure of the Directorate-General for Fisheries to include within its organisation a specific unit to deal with the management of the populations of these highly migratory species. The many RFOs in existence for these species, and those that may still be created in the future, as well as the importance of the European fleet which fishes for highly migratory fish, plus their high commercial value, which we mentioned earlier, are crying out for greater material and human resources from the Directorate-General for Fisheries and for the creation of a specific unit within it. Commissioner, if you attended a meeting, either a preparatory working meeting or an annual meeting of one of these RFOs, and saw the resources deployed by other delegations and the resources available to the Community delegation, you would immediately give the order to create such a unit. In this context and within the reform of the staff organisation of the Directorate-General for Fisheries currently taking place, Parliament therefore repeats its desire that this request be considered. I would finally like to refer to the amendments approved by the Committee on Fisheries in relation to the management expenses arising from the European Union’s membership of these RFOs for highly migratory fish. Our Committee on Fisheries has considered, and it has been taking this line previously, that if the European Union is to have exclusive competence in the field of the common fisheries policy, the international financial commitments acquired by the Commission, in exercising that exclusive competence, must in turn also be met exclusively by the Commission, by means of the Community budget, and not be passed on to the Member States. To have competence must mean having the financial capacity necessary to confront it. And a policy described as common – as is the case with the fisheries policy – must fully apply the principle of sufficiency of resources which governs it. These are the considerations, Commissioner, which I have wished to raise in relation to these two reports for which I have had the honour to be rapporteur.

Political group: PPE-DE