September 18, 2026

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September 18, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • strategic insight

LATEST
Critical Raw Materials Corporation Tests EU StockpilingHeatwave Plan Tests Europe’s Climate Adaptation GapEuropean Security Council Faces a Missing Legal BaseNature Restoration Plans Arrive With a Year of Haggling AheadPlatform Work Rules Arrive in December With Most States UnreadyDominant Firms Face Europe’s First Rulebook on Exclusionary AbuseInnovation Act Reaches Council With EU Preference Still DisputedSecondary Raw Materials Await an Act That Has Not Been TabledRiyadh Gets a Summit Date Before the Gulf Trade Text Is WrittenParliament Calls Ceuta an Invasion and Splits Its Own MajorityBaltic Quotas Would Lift Herring While Cutting Cod Bycatch SharplyFrance Switches On Mandatory E-Invoicing Before Brussels DoesMontenegro Has Fifteen Chapters and Six Months Left to Close ThemPyongyang Earns European Salaries Through Staff Nobody Ever MetNew Zealand Is the Partner Europe Talks To but Has Not SignedIndonesia Wants an October Signature Europe Has Not ScheduledNine Parliaments Still Stand Between Hanoi and Its Investment PactMEPs Back a Democracy Shield That Still Lacks a Legal ActWhy Due Cause Rarely Saves a Political Parody in CourtErasmus Budget Heads for an October Vote With Its Shares UnsettledCritical Raw Materials Corporation Tests EU StockpilingHeatwave Plan Tests Europe’s Climate Adaptation GapEuropean Security Council Faces a Missing Legal BaseNature Restoration Plans Arrive With a Year of Haggling AheadPlatform Work Rules Arrive in December With Most States UnreadyDominant Firms Face Europe’s First Rulebook on Exclusionary AbuseInnovation Act Reaches Council With EU Preference Still DisputedSecondary Raw Materials Await an Act That Has Not Been TabledRiyadh Gets a Summit Date Before the Gulf Trade Text Is WrittenParliament Calls Ceuta an Invasion and Splits Its Own MajorityBaltic Quotas Would Lift Herring While Cutting Cod Bycatch SharplyFrance Switches On Mandatory E-Invoicing Before Brussels DoesMontenegro Has Fifteen Chapters and Six Months Left to Close ThemPyongyang Earns European Salaries Through Staff Nobody Ever MetNew Zealand Is the Partner Europe Talks To but Has Not SignedIndonesia Wants an October Signature Europe Has Not ScheduledNine Parliaments Still Stand Between Hanoi and Its Investment PactMEPs Back a Democracy Shield That Still Lacks a Legal ActWhy Due Cause Rarely Saves a Political Parody in CourtErasmus Budget Heads for an October Vote With Its Shares Unsettled

Baltic Quotas Would Lift Herring While Cutting Cod Bycatch Sharply

Anton Chekhov
Policy Tracker, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries

Karlskrona: Trawler owners along Sweden’s south-eastern coast are reading a Commission proposal that would raise Baltic quotas for the small pelagic stocks they can still target while cutting almost to nothing the cod they are allowed to bring up by accident. The European Commission adopted the text on 24 August 2026, and fisheries ministers will settle it at their Council meeting on 26 and 27 October.

The increases are substantial. The Commission would lift the total allowable catch for central Baltic herring by 49 percent and for sprat by 44 percent, with Gulf of Riga herring up 11 percent and Bothnian herring up 3 percent. Those numbers follow advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, which recorded genuine improvement in the pelagic stocks.

The cuts fall on cod, and they fall hard. Western Baltic cod bycatch allowances would drop 88 percent and eastern Baltic cod 51 percent, while the sprat bycatch ceiling would fall 45 percent. Neither cod stock has supported directed fishing for years, and the Commission is proposing to shrink even the margin that tolerates accidental capture.

Plaice and the two salmon quotas would hold flat. ICES published no fresh advice for salmon this cycle, so the Commission left the by-catch levels alone, with one change — it wants recreational fishing on reared salmon stopped altogether. The full proposal sits in the Commission’s announcement of 2027 Baltic fishing opportunities.

Read together, the two halves describe a sea that is recovering unevenly. Herring and sprat sit near the bottom of the food web and respond quickly to lighter fishing pressure; cod sits above them and has not responded at all, weighed down by warm water, low oxygen in the deep basins and a parasite load that leaves eastern fish too thin to spawn well.

Some scientists argue the two trends are connected, because the same sprat that trawlers now catch in greater numbers also eat cod larvae. That makes a 44 percent pelagic increase an awkward companion to a cod collapse, and environmental groups have already said so.

Ministers have a record of arriving at higher numbers than the Commission proposes. Last October they set central Baltic herring 15 percent above 2025 levels but cut Bothnian herring by 40 percent and reduced Gulf of Riga herring by 17 percent, decisions recorded in the Council’s agreement on 2026 catch limits. Denmark holds the presidency chair for this round.

The bycatch ceilings matter more to fleets than the headline pelagic gains. A Danish or Swedish demersal vessel fishing flatfish in the western basin cannot guarantee it will avoid cod, so an 88 percent cut in the tolerance functions as a limit on where and when that vessel works at all. Several operators expect to tie up rather than risk exceeding an allocation measured in tonnes.

Coastal communities from Bornholm to the Gulf of Finland will watch October closely. The Council can soften a bycatch figure more easily than it can restore a stock, and the Commission has effectively dared ministers to take the scientific advice as written.

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