EU member states and the European Parliament have agreed a provisional deal on a new framework for collecting and using statistics on fisheries and aquaculture across the bloc.
The proposed regulation would replace five separate sets of rules with a single framework for EU-level fisheries and aquaculture statistics, the Council of the EU announced on Thursday.
It would cover data used for information such as fish catches and landings, the EU fishing fleet and aquaculture production.
The agreement keeps the main elements of the European Commission’s proposal while adding targeted amendments, the Council said.
The new framework would draw more on existing sources — including administrative data, electronic databases and registers — to produce EU statistics and avoid duplicate reporting.
Ireland’s minister of state for European affairs and defence, Thomas Byrne, said “sound fisheries management and a thriving aquaculture sector depend on reliable, high-quality data.”
Data portal planned as reporting changes agreed
A new Fisheries and Aquaculture Data Portal would be established and maintained by Eurostat — the EU’s statistics office — to collate data already collected under existing laws and make it easier to access, the Council said.
The deal also allows exemptions for member states from certain data submissions and enables simplified or aggregated reporting in specific cases.
The agreement includes changes to rules on producing EU-level statistics and sending data to international and intergovernmental organisations, with safeguards for data confidentiality.
The provisional deal must still be endorsed by both the Council and the European Parliament, before legal-linguistic checks and formal adoption.
Eurostat has produced European fisheries statistics since the 1950s, while the current rules are based on five regulations dating back to the 1990s and last substantially revised in the 2000s.
