Fish 'worth £40m' dumped annually


Crazy European regulations mean that at a time of worldwide food shortages and higher food prices at home, our fishermen are having to throw away up to £40m worth of fish for which there is a perfectly good market."

This to me is insane, in a world where people are dying of hunger, we as a nation dump millions of tonnes of fish...........crazy!

Skippers are going out of business, some are being fined hundreds of thousands of pounds if they land 'illegal' fish, and the reason? To protect fish stocks!! They are already dead ffs!

The birds are very grateful.

Saves them catching it themselves.

Why? In a word, bureaucracy. In another, stupidity. It's a total waste of food. There are proposals being put forward to allow the boats to land the catch, in exchange for missing a days sailing at a later date. This would make more sense, I think.

Being brought up in Buchan and in the center of fishing, all my pals were from several generations of fisher folk. I understood, first hand, the hardships and sacrifices these people made daily in this dangerous profession.
To see film of "illegal" fish being dumped is monstrous. Is it no wonder our fleet and its people are demoralised with the current fuel cost rises, EU quotas and its countless petty edicts. Will we wake up when all our frozen seafood will come from the third world, I hope so but long before that happens.

I think it's an abomination that fish already caught and dead are thrown overboard. I do not however have much sympathy for fishermen because the dire state of our fish stocks is in part due to their greed and often illegal behaviour. Every time marine biologists suggest a moratorium on fishing to allow stocks to recover the fishing lobby makes a lot of noise and says that stocks are actually fine and they can carry on what they're doing. What happened to the Grand Banks should be a lesson to everyone as should Iceland's zealous conservation policy within their own territorial waters. Unfortunately both fishermen and the EU Fisheries body are too stupid to take any notice. Fortunes have been made by fishermen when times were good and then they were paid huge sums of our money when the boats were removed from the fleet. Anybody else, well apart from farmers and cityboys, would be left to go bankrupt. People who worked in our old heavy industries went on the dole with no golden parachutes so why do some folk get a soft landing and not others?