Source: Slow Food
Slow Food regrets that instead of setting sustainable catch limits for 19 deep-water stocks, the Agriculture and Fisheries Council withdrew six stocks from the quota, and agreed on the fishing opportunities for only 13 deep-sea stocks in the EU and international waters in the North-East Atlantic, for 2019 and 2020.
The deep sea is one of the most sensitive areas of the oceans with a huge diversity of habitats and living species, most of which are still unknown to science. Industrial fishing fleets, including those from EU countries, fish in these areas because they consider them to be a source of profitable catches after having heavily exploited many of Europe’s coastal waters. Many deep-sea fish are, however, comparatively slow to reproduce and are particularly vulnerable.
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