Criticism
The Common Fisheries Policy has been argued by certain commentators to have had disastrous consequences on the environment. This view is contradicted by historical evidence that reveals that fishing stocks have been in chronic decline over the last century as a result of intensive trawl fishing. According to scientific research published in 2010, the depletion of fishing stocks is a consequence of mismanagement long before the Common Fisheries Policy came into being, a statement illustrated by the fact that UK catches have declined by 94% over the last 118 years.
Economists and historians recognise that common land tends to be overfarmed and overused, and in a similar vein the absence of property rights in the waters around the UK has led to overfishing such that the price of fish and seafood has rocketed. Whereas oysters were for hundreds of years the food of the poor, now they are a luxury. Cod stocks have been on the decline for some time, as have all other varieties of fish. Innovators are starting to come up with fish "farms" to get over this problem. To compound this problem, EU quotas mean that a huge number of fish are thrown overboard after being caught; yet as they are dead, this does not alleviate the problem as it was intended. Indeed, it just makes the fish at market all the more scarce and prices even higher.
The Common Fisheries policy has been a major reason for countries with big fish resources coupled with small home markets, like Norway and Iceland, the Danish dependencies Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and some more dependencies, to stay outside the European Union.
Read more about this topic: Common Fisheries Policy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)