MEPs could get the power to tell fishing crews how to catch fish, if national governments miss the chance tomorrow (20 November) to agree the rules themselves.

EU fisheries ministers meet in Brussels tomorrow and will be asked to reach agreement on a regulation that sets the technical rules on how to catch fish. At stake are the size and shape of mesh holes in fishing nets and the minimum lengths of different types of fish before they can be legally caught.

The negotiations, which are already in trouble at the level of officials, could be further complicated if ministers fail to reach agreement tomorrow. When the Lisbon treaty comes into force on 1 December, the European Parliament will have equal powers to ‘co-decide’ all fisheries laws with ministers.

The European Commission, which published the draft law in June 2008, is keen to avoid this scenario, as involving MEPs would delay the law and make the process more complicated. But member states are split on whether involving the Parliament would be a good idea.

A spokeswoman for Joe Borg, the European commissioner for fisheries, said that the Commission wants to meet the deadline of Friday.

Every country with a fishing industry is going into the negotiations with “a very long shopping list” of amendments, according to one EU source. Officials expect that tomorrow’s talks will run into the early hours of Saturday morning, with ministers haggling over the size of molluscs and fish.

Down to the millimetre

The law will have a big impact on how fishing crews work. The detail extends to the thickness of net twine down to the millimetre and the minimum catch size for 11 kinds of fish down to the centimetre, starting with cod all the way down to anchovy, as well as minimum sizes for molluscs, octopus and scallop. The fact that so many species are involved adds to the complexity of the negotiations.

The Commission hopes to consign this exercise to history through a major reform of common fisheries policy that would end the practice of writing the rules in Brussels.

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Lack of transparency

Maja-Alexandra Dittel, a policy officer at Seas at Risk, a pan-European group of environmental campaigners, said that the current system of ministerial decisions lacked transparency, but co-decision was not ideal as it could be time-consuming. She wants reforms to involve more experts in decision-making, while making the process more transparent.

“You would need a system where there is more control on the Commission than there currently is,” said Dittel.

? Agriculture ministers will meet for an extra day next month (16 December) to make up for their November meeting having been shortened by today’s summit of EU leaders.

Discussions on the future of the rural development policy will be held in December instead of tomorrow as originally planned.