Toelichting bij COM(2025)435 - European fisheries and aquaculture statistics - Hoofdinhoud
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| dossier | COM(2025)435 - European fisheries and aquaculture statistics. |
|---|---|
| bron | COM(2025)435  |
| datum | 30-07-2025 |
Inhoudsopgave
• Reasons for and objectives of the proposal
Since the inception of the European Economic Community in the 1950s, Eurostat has provided European fisheries statistics 1 on fish catches, landings, Union fishing fleet and aquaculture, which are necessary for the EU’s activities. These statistics are currently covered by five legal acts dating back to the 1990s with recasts in the 2000s 2 . The regulations lay down, among other things, the statistical variables, the fishing areas covered 3 , reference periods, transmission deadlines and statistical quality criteria.
Relevant, reliable, comprehensive and timely official European statistics are necessary to design, implement, monitor and evaluate European Union policies related to fisheries. Those statistics are needed, in particular, for: (i) conservation of marine biological resources’ policies; (ii) the common fisheries policy (CFP) 4 , including aquaculture; (iii) and EU policies and legislation on, for example, the environment, climate change adaptation and mitigation, regions, public health, food safety and the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals. Those statistics are also used for monitoring the impact of fisheries on sensitive species and habitats, and of aquaculture on water quality.
European fisheries statistics serve as a basis for other data collections, such as the data collection framework (DCF) 5 , and are relevant for sustainable food production, especially in the context of the European Green Deal.
In recent years, the CFP reforms and new EU initiatives have generated new data demands. Additionally, the number of administrative and other data sources for compiling fisheries statistics has grown. There are also overlaps between fisheries data flows from EU Member States to different departments of the European Commission, and to various international organisations. A new legal act is needed to overcome these challenges.
The Commission proposal for a regulation on European fisheries and aquaculture statistics (EFAS) aims to improve their relevance by more effectively meeting user needs. EFAS: (i) expands the statistical coverage, for example, on organic aquaculture and EU aquaculture establishments; (ii) reduces the volume of confidential data; and (iii) addresses quality issues in the reported data. In addition, in line with the EU priority on simplification, EFAS replaces five existing regulations with a single one, and reduces the administrative burden on Member States.
A key innovative aspect of EFAS is the use of existing databases, set up by EU law and available to the Commission, to produce official European statistics on catches and Union fishing fleet, thus reducing the administrative burden on the Member States. This approach also enables new statistics to be produced on discards, on recreational fisheries and on the impact of catches on sensitive species, without imposing an additional burden on respondents.
In addition, EFAS has been designed to take into account the data requirements of key international organisations, such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as regional fisheries management organisations. The proposal enables Eurostat to transmit the data on behalf of Member States to these organisations, thereby reducing duplication of effort and alleviating the administrative burden associated with multiple reporting obligations.
The initiative is part of the REFIT programme 6 and aims to improve the performance of the underlying legislation while reducing the related burdens and costs. The estimated total cost of producing European fishery statistics is around EUR 5.6 million per year for the 27 EU Member States and the European Commission, of which approximately 5% are incurred by the European Commission. The legislative proposal is estimated to reduce the costs for collecting data on catches by EUR 1.2 million annually.
• Consistency with existing provisions in the policy area
As the statistical office of the European Union, Eurostat is the producer of official European fisheries and aquaculture statistics on catches, landings, fishing fleet, and aquaculture production.
EFAS is linked with other legal acts, such as the CFP Regulation, Control Regulation 7 , which was recently amended 8 , the DCF 9 , the Union fleet register 10 and the Regulation on organic production 11 . The concepts and definitions used in the proposal are consistent with those of the legal acts mentioned above, which ensures a cohesive and comprehensive legal framework for fisheries and aquaculture statistics and EU policies in this domain. It is crucial that this new legislative proposal adheres closely to the definitions and methodologies outlined in the Control Regulation to maintain consistency and precision.
The CFP regulates the fisheries sector in the EU by creating a framework that: (i) gives direction to the sector; (ii) lays out the rules for managing the Union fishing fleet; and (iii) strives to ensure the long-term economic, environmental and social sustainability of European fisheries. To fulfil these tasks, the fisheries authorities of EU Member States are obligated to collect data related to fisheries control that cover the entire production and distribution chain (e.g. catch, landing, transport and first sales, as well as data on fishing effort, vessel characteristics, fishing licences, etc.). The main data sources include logbooks, landing declarations, transport documents, sales notes, inspection reports, and vessel-monitoring system records. Data on catches and the Union fishing fleet are transmitted to the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE). Additional data, e.g. for scientific and environmental monitoring and supporting the CFP, are governed by the DCF and are transmitted to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. All these data, collected under EU legislation and made available to the Commission, have the potential to be reused to compile official European statistics, thereby implementing the principle of ‘collect once, use several times’.
Eurostat also provides European fisheries statistics to the European Market Observatory for Fisheries and Aquaculture Products (EUMOFA) 12 , a service set up by DG MARE to provide weekly, monthly and yearly market information to the fisheries sector to improve production planning and increase production. Furthermore, Eurostat provides European fisheries statistics to the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) 13 , a long-term, marine data initiative funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund. EMODnet uses data on catches, landings and aquaculture and presents them coherently and comparably through its online visualisation portal 14 .
• Consistency with other Union policies
Fisheries statistics support EU trade policy, economic analysis and environmental policy. European fisheries statistics are a relevant data source for the needs of: (i) professional users, such as research institutions, national, regional and international fisheries organisations; and (ii) data redistributors, who use European fisheries statistics as a reference or a validation source for their own statistics, and for purposes like market monitoring and analysis in the context of EUMOFA.
To boost competitiveness and safeguard economic, social and environmental goals, the European Commission aims to reduce regulatory burdens and simplify EU laws. Statistics play a crucial role in policy making and monitoring, aligning with the Commission's overarching objective of reducing burdens. High-quality statistics inform policy decisions by helping the European Commission identify areas where burden reduction can be most impactful. They also highlight opportunities to streamline processes, support simplification, and estimate the economic and social impacts of regulations. Furthermore, statistics aid in assessing the effectiveness of regulations, enabling the Commission to refine or repeal those that are unnecessary or excessively burdensome, aligning with the goals of this initiative.
• Legal basis
Article 338 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (the Treaty) 15 outlines the EU’s competence to adopt measures for the production of statistics where necessary for the performance of its activities.
Official European statistics are essential for the accurate and independent monitoring of the CFP, a policy area where the EU has exclusive competence for conserving marine biological resources (Article 3(d) of the Treaty) and the power to adopt measures on the fixing and allocation of fishing opportunities (Article 43(3) of the Treaty). Such statistics are crucial for ensuring the fair, efficient and effective management and allocation of fishery resources, and for supporting informed decision-making across Member States.
• Subsidiarity (for non-exclusive competence)
Fisheries are a natural, renewable and movable source of food. In the EU, they are governed by a common policy, the CFP, with common rules adopted at EU level and applied in all Member States. The primary objectives of the CFP are to ensure the long-term sustainability of fisheries and aquaculture from an environmental, economic and social perspective, while providing a stable source of healthy and nutritious food for Europeans.
A common fisheries policy must inherently be based on comparable, timely and high-quality official European statistics, which can be ensured only by action at EU level. This cannot be achieved by the Member States acting in isolation, but only by a common and coordinated approach. European fisheries and aquaculture statistics legislation provides an EU-wide framework for collecting data and supplying fisheries and aquaculture statistics using concepts and definitions that are harmonised across all Member States. It imposes common standards and methodologies that not only produce comparable results needed by the CFP and other EU policies for management and analysis purposes, but also improve efficiency, timeliness and reliability.
In addition, the existence of an EU legal framework ensures quality-control mechanisms and the availability of metadata. For these reasons, national providers of European fisheries statistics and institutional stakeholders have stressed the importance of an EU-wide legal basis.
• Proportionality
Section 8 of the impact assessment accompanying this proposal discusses proportionality. The chosen instrument – a new, streamlined legal framework for European fisheries statistics – is a proportional response to achieve the objectives and solve the problems outlined above. It was necessary because it provides a better and more flexible way of meeting user needs than a less comprehensive legislative and organisational reform of European fisheries statistics would have done. Moreover, the new streamlined legal framework for European fisheries statistics will not go beyond what is necessary to modernise the data collections for catches, landings, the Union fishing fleet and aquaculture.
• Choice of the instrument
The chosen instrument is a new regulation that sets up a streamlined legal framework for European fisheries and aquaculture statistics. This option is preferable to a directive or to non-binding instruments because high-quality official European statistics that are comparable across Member States inherently require technical aspects and quality provisions, for example, to be aligned. A regulation that includes implementing and delegated provisions directly applicable in the Member States is essential to ensure that these requirements are met. This approach guarantees comparability between Member States while allowing them the flexibility to choose their data sources, as long as those sources meet the quality criteria outlined in the proposed regulation.
• Ex post evaluations/fitness checks of existing legislation
The current system of European fisheries statistics was evaluated in 2019 16 . The main conclusion of the evaluation was that European fisheries statistics are an important independent and high-quality source of information, serving several types of user needs linked to fisheries management, market monitoring and research. The internal consistency of European fisheries statistics is good and their production costs are low because, in most Member States, statistics on catches, landings and aquaculture are compiled using administrative data collected for policy purposes. European fisheries statistics have been effective in so far as they are used intensively for market monitoring purposes and are useful for international organisations such as the FAO.
At the same time, the evaluation acknowledged that information demands have changed, in particular, due to the 2013 CFP reform. In addition, the evaluation showed that, in the aquaculture sector, some data are collected but are not disseminated for confidentiality reasons, because the sector has a limited number of very specialised companies. Moreover, the evaluation confirmed that EU and global fisheries data systems give rise to inefficiencies by requiring each country to report overlapping but slightly different datasets to several organisations.
An analysis of whether European fisheries statistics are consistent with the Control Regulation data revealed some persistent discrepancies. While these remain small overall, they are significant in Mediterranean countries where the fishing fleet is composed of a large number of small vessels.
In conclusion, the evaluation found that the CFP requires good-quality fisheries statistics that are independent and fit for purpose, serve a wide range of user needs and fit well into the overall international fisheries data ecosystem.
• Stakeholder consultations
The main categories of stakeholders of European fisheries statistics are:
·data providers, i.e. fishers, aquaculture producers, etc., that provide fisheries data either as administrative data (e.g. from logbooks and landing declarations) or in surveys and censuses;
·data producers, i.e. national statistical institutes and other national authorities that collect and process fisheries data, and compile official statistics and transmit them to Eurostat and other organisations;
·data users:
·institutional users are the ones that are directly involved in EU policymaking at EU, international and national levels, as well as national research institutes linked to the DCF;
·redistributors of official European fisheries and aquaculture statistics that publicly share information and knowledge products based on European fisheries statistics. EMODnet and EUMOFA are identified as redistributors. At international level, the FAO, OECD and the World Trade Organisation are institutional users and, at the same time, redistributors;
·other professional users that contribute directly or indirectly to the policymaking process at EU level and add value to European fisheries statistics, for example, with scientific or socio-economic analyses. They include EU professional fisheries organisations, advisory councils, NGOs with marine programmes, sea conventions, specialised fisheries media, universities, research institutes, national fisheries organisations, private sector aquaculture organisations and individual private companies;
·the general public and the media have only a relatively low interest in fisheries statistics and very limited influence.
Accordingly, the European fisheries statistics consultation strategy focused on reaching these stakeholder groups and conducted a large range of consultation activities between 2018 and 2020. These included:
·a workshop with Member States on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of European fisheries statistics from national statistical institutes’ point of view;
·16 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, for example policymakers and contributors to the CFP, on their use, needs and expectations of European fisheries statistics. The key stakeholders were redistributors (i.e. organisations that redistribute European fisheries statistics through their own databases and add information from other countries or areas) and regular professional users (organisations that need European fisheries statistics to carry out their main professional activities);
·six national case studies and one cross-country aquaculture case study to provide overviews and detailed analyses of different data collection and collaboration approaches. The purpose of the case studies was to provide an overview of national set-ups for collecting European fisheries statistics and to analyse them in a more detailed manner. They also served as a basis for understanding how various collaborations on fisheries-related data are organised in Member States and how organisations cooperate. In addition, the case studies aimed to analyse how national data users use European fisheries statistics and to assess whether European fisheries statistics are meeting their needs from a national perspective. The national case studies took place in Denmark, Ireland, Greece, France, Italy and Poland. In addition, the supporting cross-cutting case study on aquaculture, which focused in particular on the data confidentiality issue, covered the above-mentioned countries, as well as Germany;
·an online survey was carried out as a targeted expert-oriented consultation with general and specific questions about European fisheries statistics: their utility, ease of use, cost of collection, statistical quality, efficiency, effectiveness and consistency. 135 organisations or individuals out of 353 contacted responded. Responses were received from 33 of 36 countries contacted (including Member States, EEA countries, candidate and potential candidate countries);
·a public consultation to gather information from professional users, individuals and other stakeholders on their experiences with European fisheries statistics. 24 respondents answered the questionnaire.
As the European fisheries statistics impact assessment followed immediately after the evaluation, it reused much of the evidence gathered for the evaluation. Additionally, in 2019‑2020, it organised specific consultations of the general public, experts (data users) and data producers.
·The consultation of the general public: (i) focused on whether European fisheries statistics meet respondents’ needs; and (ii) allowed respondents to comment on and rank the objectives and possible options of the impact assessment, and give feedback on the options’ potential impacts. It received 15 responses, with a new streamlined legal framework emerging as the preferred option.
·The consultation of experts focused on data needs and received 35 responses. The respondents gave detailed responses on: (i) their data needs for catches, landings and aquaculture; (ii) their preferences regarding the frequency and timeliness of the data; and (iii) the purposes for which they use European fisheries statistics (e.g. market and traceability analyses).
·The consultation of data producers took place during the annual meeting of the Directors’ Group on Agricultural and Fisheries Statistics (DGAS). It was attended by all Member States and EEA countries, as well as by some candidate and potential candidate countries. The objective was to brainstorm the potential impacts of the draft options, propose other options, rank the options and contribute to the impact assessment.
After the evaluation and the impact assessment, consultation continued with the following activities:
·several structured meetings, which took place in 2022 and 2023 with institutional personnel, sector organisations, Member State representatives, private producers, sectorial organisations and scientists;
·several Eurostat fisheries statistics working group meetings and one dedicated DGAS meeting, which took place in 2022 and 2023, were pivotal for selecting the most fit-for-purpose option among the different technical approaches and for fine-tuning methodological procedures. Among others, representatives of the United Nations Global Compact 17 and the European Algae Biomass Association 18 participated in these meetings.
• Collection and use of expertise
The Commission collected and used the various forms of outside expertise highlighted in the ‘stakeholder consultations’ section above in order to shape and develop the European fisheries statistics legislation. A crucial role was played by national statistical institutes, which contributed with their expertise by participating actively in regular domain-specific working groups, task forces, and DGAS. These meetings facilitated extensive discussions and exchanges of views.
• Impact assessment
An impact assessment for European fisheries statistics was conducted in 2021 and received a positive opinion from the Regulatory Scrutiny Board on 4 June 2021 19 . These documents will be published together with the legal proposal and are available upon request until then.
To achieve the objectives of the proposed Regulation, four options were considered.
1. The baseline scenario; i.e. the continuation of the current European fisheries statistics.
2. The discontinuation of European fisheries statistics.
3. A new, streamlined legal framework for European fisheries statistics.
4. A new legal basis for aquaculture and the compilation of available fisheries statistics from EU-level administrative sources; i.e. a hybrid option between options 2 and 3, in which landing statistics would be discontinued.
In light of the impact assessment, the results of the consultation activities and discussions with stakeholders, the preferred option was option 3; i.e. a new streamlined legal framework for European fisheries statistics. The preferred option was supported by the main data users: the European Commission departments, the OECD, the FAO, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, several regional fisheries management organisations, a large majority of the national statistical authorities responsible for fisheries statistics in the European statistical system (ESS) and a majority of the respondents to the consultations.
This option responds best to the objectives of the REFIT programme by simplifying and streamlining the five legal acts currently governing European fisheries statistics into one coherent legal framework. The preferred option allows statistical requirements to be aligned flexibly with evolving user needs related to the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the CFP and related EU policies. It also replaces the current partly uncoordinated and duplicated approaches with a coherent Commission-wide strategy and a renewed architecture for European fisheries and aquaculture statistics. This is important for efficient policy delivery and resource use.
Moreover, the option will lead to the reduction of costs and burdens in several ways. Firstly, it will cut double data collection for catch statistics, as the data may be taken directly from EU-level administrative sources. This reduces the administrative and data collection costs and also the time expenditure for respondents, i.e. fishers. Secondly, EFAS is aligned with the needs of the FAO, the OECD and regional fisheries’ management organisations. This will give Member States the option of allowing Eurostat to transmit data, on their behalf and upon their agreement, to those organisations and will, thus, reduce multiple reporting obligations. Thirdly, more data will become available to data users once the data structure for aquaculture has been simplified, resulting in less data being confidential. Fourthly, the simplification of the data reporting mechanisms will ease the burden on data providers and data producers.
The preferred option is expected to make European fisheries statistics more relevant, as the new legal framework would be updated to reflect new user needs, such as:
·total catches, including discards and recreational fisheries, with information on sensitive species;
·landings of the Union fishing fleet globally and those of third country vessels in EU ports;
·organic and regional dimensions of aquaculture.
There is a growing need for more detailed and timely European statistics to support the implementation of various Commission initiatives, including the action plans for organic production, sustainable aquaculture, a sustainable blue economy, algae sector development, energy transition in fisheries and aquaculture and marine ecosystem protection.
European fisheries statistics would become more effective, as they would still provide the existing benefits (e.g. being a one-stop shop for high-quality, comparable fisheries and aquaculture statistics with long time series that are accessible to all), as well as a simpler and more streamlined legal framework that can better integrate and serve new user needs. Reducing double reporting by aligning definitions and reorganising data flows would also reduce discrepancies between different data sources and therefore increase the reliability, accuracy and international comparability of European fisheries statistics.
The main direct costs for stakeholders relate to adapting the statistical and technical systems in the ESS. These adaptation costs are expected to be marginal. Owing to more efficient data use and simplified data flows, the new legal basis for European fisheries statistics is expected to lead in the mid to long term to cost savings of approximately EUR 1.2 million annually (based on an estimated total cost of producing European fisheries statistics of about EUR 5.6 million per year for the 27 Member States and the European Commission). The national statistical authorities should benefit from these cost savings, as a part of the European fisheries statistics would be compiled directly on the basis of EU-level administrative data for the CFP, and multiple data flows would be simplified into a single one encompassing EU-level and international needs.
This initiative’s impact on SMEs and competitiveness is marginal, as most companies in the fisheries and aquaculture sector are small or medium-sized companies that already need to transmit the data for administrative purposes. Furthermore, most of the statistics are produced from these existing datasets. Micro-SMEs with fewer than 10 employees cannot be excluded from having to collect European fisheries statistics data because most EU fishing vessels have crews with fewer than 10 members. However, the impacts on them are marginal.
Statistical regulations have a direct impact on the resources needed to fulfil the legislative requirements of European fisheries statistics, such as the management and time/inputs required by data providers, data producers and Eurostat. They are relatively limited, as the regulations primarily affect a narrow group of data providers that need to provide the administrative data anyway, and a small number of organisations responsible for producing statistics, such as national statistical authorities. As regulations are directly applicable in Member States, the activities triggered by their implementation, such as the collection, processing and validation of statistics by the countries and Eurostat constitute impacts that have a cost in terms of resources. However, the costs are limited, as the ESS already produces fisheries statistics and only adjustments are required.
European fisheries statistics have far-reaching, indirect impacts on areas like policy management and marine resource conservation, as they facilitate evidence-based policy design, implementation, and monitoring by providing high-quality, comparable data across countries. However, these impacts are challenging to envisage and quantify, as it is difficult to forecast how policymakers and other users will utilise the statistics and the weight they will assign to them in the decision-making process.
• Regulatory fitness and simplification
REFIT cost-savings of the preferred option:
| Description | Amount | Comments |
| Catch data: reduction of burden and costs by eliminating double data reporting for catches. | Annual savings for direct costs linked to catch data estimated to be approximately EUR 1.2 million when compared to baseline. | It is planned to produce catch statistics from EU-level administrative data sources. Member States would no longer need to transmit catch statistics. Direct and indirect cost-savings to data producers (national statistical institutes and other national authorities). The cost-savings are based on the figures provided by the Member States, and they stem mostly from direct and indirect personnel costs and survey costs. In the long term, the change is estimated to be cost-neutral to the Commission. |
| Reuse of the European fisheries statistics by international organisations. | Reduction in burden at Member State and international organisation level, owing to the elimination of several transmission and validation activities. | Data producers (national statistical institutes and other national authorities) and data users (international organisations) benefit from simplified data flows; ‘collect once, use several times’. |
| Improving effectiveness: reduction of confidential data. | More data would be accessible to data users at the same cost as before. | By simplifying the data structure, more data would become available to users at the same cost and burden on data providers and data producers. |
The estimated total cost of producing European fisheries statistics is about EUR 5.6 million per year for the Member States and the European Commission, of which approximately 5% are incurred by the European Commission. The estimated annual cost-savings for catch data are EUR 1.2 million, i.e. 21% of total costs.
These costs represent 0.05% of the annual value of EU fisheries and aquaculture production, which is very low. The reason for this low cost is the widespread use of available administrative data as source data for catch, landings and fleet statistics.
Member States pay production costs for European fisheries statistics from their budgets, as the national statistical institutes must fulfil EU legal obligations for these statistics and also regularly adapt their systems to new or updated regulations.
• Implementation plans and monitoring, evaluation and reporting arrangements
As European fisheries statistics are statistical regulations that are directly applicable in EU Member States, no special support or implementation plan is needed.
• Explanatory documents (for directives)
No explanatory documents are needed.
• Detailed explanation of the specific provisions of the proposal
This legal proposal sets up an integrated framework for aggregated European fisheries and aquaculture statistics related to: (i) the extraction of marine biological resources by fishing activities and their entry into the market; (ii) the structure of the catching vessels; and (iii) the production and structure of aquaculture establishments. It emphasises reusing EU-level administrative data for compiling these statistics and reducing duplications and overlaps of data flows in order to reduce burdens and costs for national data providers and producers.
Following the definition of the subject matter and scope, Article 1 categorises the data to be collected into two main domains: fisheries and aquaculture. Within these domains, it outlines topics and detailed topics, which are further specified in the Annex. Articles 2 and 3 present relevant terms (definitions), and observation units. Article 4 establishes data requirements and sets out the criteria for exempting Member States from submitting data on certain variables to the Commission (Eurostat). It also empowers the Commission to adopt delegated acts for the purposes of adding, deleting or changing topics and detailed topics, and to implement acts to specify the required datasets and their technical components. This structure has the advantage of offering a harmonised basis with the same common aspects for all topics, while handling differences between topics in secondary legislation.
Article 5 lays down that the Commission can adopt delegated acts to collect data on an ad hoc basis if it is deemed necessary to address additional statistical needs. Article 6 clarifies the coverage of statistics under the regulation.
To limit the administrative burden, Article 7 empowers the Commission – unless there is an objection from a Member State – to produce national and European statistics on catches and fleet by reusing the relevant data from the databases or registers set up by EU law that are either maintained by the Commission or set up at national level and to which the Commission has access. Article 7 also provides for the possibility to produce European statistics on landings and aquaculture using the same approach in the future.
Article 8 stipulates the data sources that the Member States must use, provided that they enable European statistics to be produced that meet the quality requirements laid down in Article 11 of this Regulation. Article 9 introduces the possibility and conditions for the Commission (Eurostat), in agreement with the Member State concerned, to transmit the aggregated data covered by this regulation to international, intergovernmental and regional fisheries management organisations.
Articles 10 and 11 refer to the reference periods and quality reporting for which the Commission may adopt implementing acts. Article 12 sets up a transitional regime for transmitting data on catches from recreational fisheries and data on catches of sensitive species, as required under Council Regulation (EC) No 1224/2009, until those data become available.
Article 13 specifies the activities that might be subject to a EU financial contribution. Articles 14-18 set out mechanisms for granting derogations and exercising delegation, as well as the committee procedure, repeals and entry into force.