European Diary:Sergei Petrov drags the net from the water and lets its contents spill out over the deck. He has dragged about 300 fish up from the depths of the Atlantic, about 70 miles off the coast of Portugal. As they begin flapping around the 9m Portuguese fishing boat Success, the 43-year-old Russian fisherman begins plucking the edible species from the pile.
"I guess it is an average catch for us," says Petrov, who sports several gold teeth and a weather-beaten face that reflects his two decades of fishing seas all over the world from Peru to Russia.
He deftly plucks sole, plaice, ray and dogfish from the pile and throws the immature fish - most of which are dead - overboard. The boat's owner, Antonio Joaquim Ferreira, joins Petrov as they pack the fish into boxes.
Both men follow this gruelling routine seven nights a week, almost every day of the year. But in recent years their catches have been declining as European fish stocks have suffered from a combination of overfishing, illegal fishing and climate change.
"Life for fishermen in Portugal is getting harder now because there are less fish in the water . . . I love fishing so I am planning to go to Morocco to work as a fisherman. I've heard there are more fish there," says Petrov, who has been working in Portugal for 13 years.
In May scientists at the European Commission warned that 81 per cent of European fish stocks are dangerously below "safe biological limits".
The EU executive also issued a stern warning to member states, which regularly agree fishing quotas above the levels sought by scientists.
"On average over the last five years, total allowable catches (TACs) were between 42-57 per cent higher than they should have been, according to our scientific advice," said Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg. "Add to this the fact that TACs are regularly overshot and you have a recipe not just for stagnation, but for potential disaster."
To halt the decline the commission wants to cut back on member states' fishing efforts. It is reducing national fish quotas, cutting the amount of time vessels can spend at sea, and limiting the type of fishing gear that fishermen can use to find and catch fish. It is also offering fishermen compensation if they decommission their vessels and leave the industry (for example, Portuguese fishermen received €22.9 million in EU compensation funds from 2000 to 2006).
Yet environmentalists warn the measures do not go far enough and are being undermined by new incentives from EU states, often with Brussels's backing. "On 23rd July there is a huge decision up for consideration at the council with the commission seeking to reintroduce further fuel subsidies into the fishing sector," says Markus Knigge, an expert on fisheries at WWF, the global conservation organisation.
"The regulation would enable states to provide state aid worth €10,000 to fishing operations per year. This would amount to about a quarter of the running cost for a Portuguese trawler."
Knigge also criticises a decision by the commission not to penalise French fishermen for overfishing the endangered bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. Despite the French having exceeded their quota by 30 per cent last year, the commission failed to take action at the fisheries council in June, says Knigge, who describes the situation as "outrageous".
Under the umbrella of the EU's common fisheries policy, the commission and member states set an annual quota for tuna of 29,000 tonnes in the Mediterranean. Scientists said it should be slashed to 15,000 tonnes given the poor state of tuna stocks.
"If things continue on as they are going, in 50 years there will be no seafood," warns Boris Worm, co-author of a study published in the journal Science last November.
"Our global study found that only in US waters had there been a recovery in fish stocks in the past decade and this was due to tough management measures . . . the fishing levels in EU waters are too high and don't allow for recovery of stocks."
He warns that, without action, many species could go the way of Canadian cod stocks, which collapsed in the 1980s and have never recovered.
"The good news is that we know how to recover fish stocks. It has been done in the US, which introduced pre-agreed quotas when stock levels fell to low levels. Ad-hoc rules [ such as the ones agreed in the EU] are often difficult to enforce and allow for political negotiation, where there isn't really any room for negotiation," says Worm.
But agreeing tough sanctions and restrictions is not popular with fishermen such as Petrov, who is already struggling to make ends meet.
"The life of the fisherman is becoming worse," says Joaquim Gil Sousa Pilo, chairman of the Portuguese fishermen's syndicate.
"The EU restricts the type of technology they can use so they have to fish more often. We can now only fish for a third of the cod we need - the rest we import from Norway.
"And while fish prices rise in restaurants they are lower for fishermen selling to merchants. It is a tough life."
This is the conundrum fisheries ministers and the commission face at the council, and in developing a new maritime policy for launch in the autumn.