The Committee on Fisheries adopted a report drafted by Philippe MORILLON (ALDE, FR), and amended, in the first reading of the co-decision procedure, the proposal for a regulation on the submission by Member States of statistics on aquaculture.
The proposed amendments aim to improve the clarity and coherence of the text, take account of the problems faced by some Member States and make provision for information and regular updates for the Parliament and the Council concerning the application of the Regulation. The main amendments adopted in committee are as follows:
- in order to ensure smooth transition from the regime applicable under Regulation (EC) 788/96, this Regulation should allow for a transitional period of up to three years to be granted to Member States where its application to their national statistical systems would require major adaptations and would be likely to cause significant practical problems;
- he term ‘Community statistics’ has the same meaning as in Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 322/97. “Capture-based aquaculture” means the practice of collecting specimens from the wild and their subsequent use in aquaculture. "Production" means the output from aquaculture at first sale, including production from hatcheries and nurseries offered for sale;
- Member States shall (not “may”) use surveys or other statistically validated methods covering at least 90% of the total production by volume or by number for the production of hatcheries. The remaining part of the total production may be estimated. To estimate more than 10% of the total production, a request for derogation may be submitted under the conditions provided for in Article 8;
- a Member State having a total annual production of less than 1000 tonnes (the Commission had proposed 500) may submit summary data estimating the total production;
- a new Article stipulates that Member States shall identify the production by species. However the production of those species which individually do not exceed 500 tonnes and do not represent more than 5% in weight of the production by volume in a Member State may be estimated and aggregated. The production of hatcheries and nurseries in number of those species may be estimated;
- the data shall relate to the reference calendar year and shall cover: 1) the annual production (volume and unit value) of aquaculture; 2) the annual input (volume and unit value) to capture-based aquaculture; 3) the annual production of hatcheries and nurseries;
- Member States shall submit the data referred to in Annexes I, II and III to Eurostat within twelve months (rather than nine) of the end of the reference calendar year. The first reference year shall be 2008 (instead of 2007);
- Member States shall provide the Commission with a yearly report on the quality of the data transmitted. At the first submission of the data, Member States shall submit to the
Commission a detailed methodological report describing how the data were collected and compiled. In the quality report, Member States shall describe how the data were collected and compiled;
- within a period of three years starting from the date of entry into force of this Regulation and every three years thereafter, the Commission shall submit an evaluation report to the European Parliament and to the Council on the statistics compiled pursuant to the Regulation and, in particular, on their relevance and quality. This kind of report shall also undertake a cost-effectiveness analysis of the system introduced to collect and draw up the statistics and shall indicate best practices to lessen the workload for Member States and enhance the usefulness and quality of the data;
- one amendment aims to limit clearly the Commission’s powers to adopt only technical changes to the Annexes;
- lastly, the Regulation should apply from 1 January 2009.