Anglers may have been sat beside a radio this morning instead of by a river holding fishing rods as European Union fisheries commissioner Maria Damanaki spoke on air about the controversial discards policy.
Ms Damanaki was upfront about her desire to change the policy – which sees fishermen throw away up to half of their catches dead to meet their quotas – when she appeared on the BBC Today programme.
"This is something we could afford when we had healthy stocks," Ms Damanaki said of the policy, adding that "nobody can justify" the level of discards today as fish stocks decline.
She will be putting her thoughts to delegates from EU member states in a meeting in Brussels today, and hopes to bring a ban into force when the Common Fisheries Policy is reformed in 2013.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV Fish Fight series focused on the abandoning of many caught fish and the waste of food resources, which he believes are upheld by the EU policy.
