Problems with a new digital European system for certifying fishing catches are hampering producers and delaying exports, according to ministers from several EU member states.
The European Commission introduced the digital version of Catch on January 10, replacing equivalent paper systems, with the aim of tackling illegal fishing.
However, a group of countries led by Spain say the digital system has “significant technical and legal shortcomings,” including a lack of integration with customs control systems and countries outside the EU that use its certification scheme.
Speaking at the EU’s meeting of agriculture and fisheries ministers in Brussels on January 26, Hilde Crevits, vice-minister-president of Belgium’s Flemish government, said that January 10 “was too early to start.”
The Catch system was holding up containers at ports including Antwerp and Zeebrugge, as well as at the UK border. “Fisheries products don’t have a very long shelf life,” she said through an official translator.
Crevits added that a related new regulation that requires captains to record the weights caught for each type of fish in a digital logbook is difficult in Belgian fishing grounds with 20 species: “You just try it.”
One importer told The Financial Times that it had dozens of shipping containers of fish stuck in Rotterdam in the Netherlands as the Catch system was only clearing about half of its shipments.
“We keep getting inexplicable error messages, server errors,” an employee of the company told the newspaper, with the system not including all fish species and postal codes for all countries covered. The system also has size limits on uploading catch certificates from non-EU countries as PDFs, which the importer said were too low.
“The technical gaps and lack of interoperability with third parties risk paralysing the imports and logistics of our companies without adding any benefits,” Marco Canaparo, Italy’s deputy permanent representative, told the agriculture and fisheries meeting.
In response, a European Commission official said some issues had been caused by a shift from patchy national implementations of the previous paper-based versions. ®