Fishermen associations and industry protests have had some effect. Although the European Commission gave full backing to the ICES stock assessment, it ditched the idea of a moratorium and instead the governments involved agreed on a deal that outlined a longer-term North Sea cod recovery plan. It greatly reduces fishing effort (days at sea) on cod, haddock and whiting, on one hand, and an increases support aimed at alleviating socio-economic harm to fishermen, on the other. Unsurprisingly the deal angered fishermen as much as it dismayed conservationists. The latter consider it anything between political fudge and a betrayal of the future of Europe's fish stocks. Fishermen are afraid that the reduced effort and quotas won’t keep them afloat, and that the proposed support would be inadequate.

Fishermen’s representatives’ criticism of the EU’s management encompasses several issues. For example, they say that the EU is obsessed with "one size fits all" approach to regulation, that a fishery cannot be managed at the same time by effort and catch restrictions, that the scientific advise, concocted from national research data under the auspices of the ICES, lacks the scientific validation needed for underpinning legal management steps.

Whatever the causes, and whatever is going to be the outcome of what the EU now calls "alarming state" of the of stocks of the North Atlantic whitefish, European fishing people are going to experience detrimental social and economic consequences. A fisherman prevented from going fishing in a feasible manner has got several options, writes Hamish Morrison, the chief of a Scottish fishermen’s federation: to permanently withdraw his boat from the fleet, to temporarily lay-up, to move to an alternative fishery, to go bankrupt, or to go poaching.