Norwegian coastguards filmed this UK trawler discarding 80% of its catch of endangered fish just outside Norwegian waters earlier this year

Every year the EU and Norway get together to agree how to share out fishing quotas in their adjacent waters (remember, Norway is not a member of the EU, and has it's own exclusive fishing zone, unlike EU countries). They are gathering this week, and it always happens before the annual quota-haggling meeting of the EU Council in Brussels, where the EU decide and divide on quotas for fish in EU waters.

Usually they do their best to ignore scientific advice, and amazingly all of the fisheries ministers seem to manage to go back home claiming to have won a 'good deal' for their respective fishing industries.

Another year, another botched up decision by the EU fisheries ministers. Early this morning they agreed to increase next year's quota on cod fishing in the North Sea by 11 per cent.

They've been ignoring the science for the last seven years, why should this year be any different? The EU's own scientists have said that the stocks are in such trouble that the quota must be reduced, but we knew these bureaucrats couldn't be trusted to make the right decision - that's why we attempted to shut them out of the meeting on Monday.

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Almost 200 Greenpeace volunteers shut down the EU fisheries quota meeting in Brussels

I remember when they closed the cod fisheries off the east coast of Canada. I was just finishing high school in a sleepy town in Nova Scotia. It was probably the first time an environmental disaster touched my life. You see, almost half my family are fishermen.

Even before the stocks were closed I remember my uncles talking about the dwindling fish, but rather than easing off they were hunting them down to cash in as the cost of the fish rose. I suppose it was unimaginable to them that these fish - which used to make the seas around the Grand Banks bubble - could ever disappear.
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