Norway is set to introduce strict new rules for commercial fishing boats requiring all fish caught within its waters to be landed at an official fishing port. The regulations will state that all boats, regardless of nationality, must take their catch back to a proper port in a bid to discourage wasteful dumping of fish when boats do not have a quota, FishUpdate.com reports.

The announcement was made by Helga Pedersen, Norway’s fisheries minister, upon her return from the Nor-Fishing Exhibition in Trondheim. The decision to tighten fishing rules within Norwegian waters probably stemmed from a recent incident in which two British trawlers were witnessed dumping their catch within Norwegian territory because they had no quota and thus could not return to port in the UK.

Pedersen said, “I want a requirement that all fish caught in Norwegian waters, also by foreign vessels, must be taken to port, regardless of which final port is used. We will introduce new requirements, for instance as a condition for obtaining licenses to fish, that vessels wishing to fish in Norwegian waters cannot discard valuable fish caught here. Moreover, in connection with the annual quota negotiations between the EU and Norway this autumn, we will demand further binding measures to reduce the discard of all joint stocks.”

She added that, “Discard not only means a massive waste of food and potential income, it also leads to unrecorded catches, resulting in a poorer scientific basis for our management decisions.”