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Domestic political dispute over Sweden’s stance on fishing quotas

by AI | 18.Oct 2024 | Europe in brief AI

The government says it is pursuing a restrictive policy for fishing in the Baltic Sea when the EU’s fisheries ministers meet. But the opposition is strongly critical and believes that the herring stock may collapse.

Sill. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa

Stockholm – Minister of Rural Affairs Peter Kullgren says that the Swedish government is pursuing a restrictive line for fishing in the Baltic Sea when EU’s fisheries ministers meet on Monday.

“It is one of the most restrictive positions we have had. The quotas should not increase from this year, and we already have historically quite low quotas,” he says after a meeting in the Parliament’s EU committee.

The EU Commission has proposed a doubling of herring fishing in the central Baltic Sea compared to last year’s quotas.

Kullgren says that the government is pursuing this line to ensure that the stocks of herring and sprat in the Gulf of Bothnia, the Bay of Bothnia, and the central Baltic Sea increase. The opposition parties, the Social Democrats, the Left Party, and the Green Party, on the other hand, are pushing for Sweden to stop industrial fishing. The Green Party even argues that the Commission’s proposal goes against the EU’s own fishing laws.

“If we pursue a line that is perceived as apart from everyone else, then we will not be particularly interesting with our 2.3 percent of the EU’s population,” says Kullgren.

Most of the EU countries want to stay close to the maximum level proposed by the international organization ICES, according to Kullgren.

“My goal is that we should be at the table, that we should pull the quotas as low as possible,” he says.

(October 18)