UK fishermen’s leaders are due to meet European commission officials in Brussels on Thursday Sept. 17 to put the industry’s case against the blanket EU ban on drift netting.
The proposed ban threatens the livelihoods of fishermen right around the coast and has shocked and angered the industry, which argues that it is a ‘knee jerk’ reaction to problems in the Mediterranean that have no relevance to the UK’s small scale fisheries.
The ban proposal is even more surprising in view of the fact that it was made ahead of the publication of a major commission report looking at drift netting throughout the EU that does not provide any justification for a blanket ban.
But
