Changes from report parliamentary committee draft to plenary report

According to Article 48 of Regulation No 1379/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2013 on the common organisation of the markets in fishery and aquaculture products states that the Commission shall report to the European Parliament and the Council on the results of the application of the Regulation by 31 December 2022.

The Commission adopted this report on 21st of February 2023 and the PECH Committee decided to do an implementation report of the said Regulation.

The current CMO Regulation was adopted in the same package of the revision of the CFP Regulation in 2013. The revision in 2013 made some fundamental changes to the functioning of the common market organisation for fishery and aquaculture products. The revision strengthened especially the role of Producer Organisation in the management of the market while several of the market intervention measures was scrapped such as the measures for the permanent withdrawal of fishery products from human consumption or their destruction. Producer Organisation do also play an important role in relation to competition rules since it is only Producer Organisations recognised under the CMO-regulation that would be able to derogate from competition rules as well as access specific EU-funds dedicated to their actions of managing the market.

The CMO Regulation is an integral and important part of the network of rules that constitutes the rules of the Common Fisheries Policy and especially in order to ensure a well-managed and functioning market for fisheries and aquaculture products. It contributes substantially to ensure competitiveness, market stability, transparency and ensuring a diverse supply of aquatic food to consumers.

Rapporteur position

The rapporteur welcomes the progress made in implementing the CMO-rules but believes that more efforts are needed in order to ensure consumer information, improve labelling, market transparency and increase traceability of fisheries and aquaculture products.

The rapporteur has noted several reports indicating as well as in the Commission report on the implementation of the CMO-rules that there is a lack of harmonised application of the rules. Therefore, the rapporteur believes that more efforts need to be made by the Commission and Member States to have a better and more harmonised implementation of the CMO Regulation. Having a more harmonised implementation is of importance in order to ensure consumer trust in the aquatic food products placed on the single market and in order to ensure level playing field for EU fishers and aquaculture farmers.

The rapporteur welcomes the intention to present a proposal for a Framework legislation on Sustainable Food Systems with the aim to provide further transparency and information to consumers. Such a framework legislation needs to ensure that it does not create additional administrative burden and aligns with condition for sustainability that is set in other pieces of EU-legislation.

The rapporteur welcomes the outcome of the negotiations on the revision of the Fisheries Control Regulation, especially the rules aiming at strengthening traceability provisions for all fisheries and aquaculture products. This will be an important part in ensuring traceability information for the European consumers, in this regard there is a need for the Commission to propose further action to ensure that this information reaches the final consumer in an easy and accessible way.

EUMOFA is The European Market Observatory for fisheries and aquaculture and it is a market intelligence tool on the European Union fisheries and aquaculture sector, developed by the European Commission. It aims to increase market transparency and efficiency, analyses EU markets dynamics, and supports business decisions and policy-making. EUMOFA enables direct monitoring of volumes, values and prices of fisheries and aquaculture products, from the first sale to retail stage, including imports and exports. Data are collected from EU countries, Iceland, Norway, United Kingdom and from EU institutions and updated every day.

The rapporteur thinks that this tool should be further utilised by Member States in order to further improve the data collected under the instrument as this tool could be further used to analyse the market and especially when drastic changes, such as during the COVID crisis occurs, in order to activate crisis tools and options to stabilise the market.

The EU has a strong stance against IUU-fishing and further action is needed in order to make further progress in this regard. In this work against IUU-fishing improvement in traceability and transparency in the supply chain of the aquatic food sector is of major importance.

Producer Organisations have a stronger role in the current CMO Regulation and therefore it is of importance that organisations already existing in Member States that performs roles similar to that of Producer Organisations would be recognised. The CMO rules are there to make management of the market easy and especially for the fishers and aquaculture farmers and not to force structural changes of organisations representing them and the supply chain just in order to fit a common EU definition.

The rapporteur therefore believes that the Commission should listen to the several call of the European Parliament that the criteria for the recognition of producer organisation must be adapted to better accommodate all the different organisations in Member States preforming to a large extent task falling under the objectives of a Producer Organisation. Examples of such organisation that should be recognised would be cofradias and Prud’homie de pêche.