Submission of statistical data on landings of fishery products in Member States

 The committee adopted the report by its chairman, Philippe MORILLON (ALDE, FR), broadly approving the proposed regulation on the submission of data on landings of fishery products in Member States, subject to a number of amendments under the 1st reading of the codecision procedure:

- it should be stipulated that the statistical data shall cover total landings on national territory "within the European Union", given that the national authorities do not have statistical data from their overseas areas;

- a new article provided for the Commission to report regularly to Parliament and the Council (three years after the regulation's entry into force and every three years thereafter) on the relevance and quality of the statistics compiled, including a cost-effectiveness analysis of the system used as well as reports on best practices for lessening the workload for Member States and enhancing the usefulness and quality of the data;

- the committee felt that some Member States would have difficulty in submitting data on all the intended uses provided for in Annex IV and therefore proposed that mandatory submissions be restricted to the first two categories (human consumption and industrial use), while the submission of data on the other intended uses would be made voluntary;

- MEPs added a number of missing definitions to the proposal, such as "withdrawn from the market", "bait", "animal feed", "waste", and "intended use unknown".