Fishermen's livelihoods and the entire economy of Scotland’s smaller, mainly west coast, ports are under threat from the new EU ban on discarding fish at sea, industry leaders warned this week.

New rules due to take effect in January will increasingly encourage larger boats to land fish at large ports, while smaller vessels could be saddled with crippling transport costs, trade organisations said.

Under the Scottish Government’s interpretation of the new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), launched last year, fishermen will be saddled with the cost of storing and then transporting unwanted catch to one of Scotland’s two fishmeal plants in Aberdeen and Lerwick unless other means of getting rid of the fish are found and agreed.

As the ban now forces fishermen to land their entire catch, instead of throwing unwanted and undersized fish overboard, industry leaders fear that larger boats based in west coast ports from Stornoway to Ardrossan, might – if they were fishing in the North Sea – decide to land their catches at ports close to the two fishmeal plants rather than their usual home ports to save on road transport costs.

Tom Bryan-Brown of the Mallaig and North-West Fishermen’s Association said that smaller boat skippers faced “astronomic” storage and transport costs that could put some out of business.

“In all businesses there is a tipping point where it becomes no longer viable to keep going,” he told the Sunday Herald. “There are more than likely going to be casualties because of this.”

According to Bryan-Brown, fishermen are unlikely to earn more than £100 per tonne, or £5 for each box of fish sent to a fishmeal plant, while it would cost around £8.50 a box to send the fish across Scotland from Mallaig to the nearest fishmeal plant in Aberdeen.

He said that while the Scottish Government had held talks with fishermen about the new CFP obligations, the industry had been left in no doubt that “the government are certainly not going to pay for transport and storage".

According to the Scottish Tory MEP Ian Duncan, who helped draft the EU “landings obligation” regulation, the legislation requires member states and not the industry to pay for the onshore storage and transport of unwanted fish but that the Scottish Government has “chosen to interpret the regulation in the manner most detrimental to fishermen”.

“I don’t think the Scottish Government has heard what fishermen are saying about this issue and if we are not careful there could be serious unintended consequences,” he said.

“Unless the government changes its mind and offers financial assistance, Scottish fishermen will be facing open-ended storage and transport costs”.

The phased discard ban, first introduced for pelagic fish like herring and mackerel last January, has so far had little impact in Scotland. Fishing for these species, which swim in concentrated shoals, does not create a large by-catch of unwanted fish.

But from January 2016 and for the following three years the ban will be gradually extended to all fish species including demersal whitefish species such as cod, haddock and whiting.

The discards ban was introduced by the EU to stop the controversial practice of throwing surplus dead fish overboard following a public outcry in the UK to campaigns such as Fish Fight led by celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

According to Duncan MacInnes of the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association the small quantities of unwanted fish that would be landed at the smallest ports on the west coast (amounting to a few boxes each day in ports such as Lochinver or Tobermory) would make the building of storage infrastructure financially unviable, regardless of whether the EU, or the Scottish Government or the industry was paying.

In addition to the cost of storing and transporting unmarketable fish, MacInnes warned that fishermen will also be hit by the additional cost of having to "lease quota" for unwanted fish which the discard ban will now force them to land.

“The most fragile and peripheral areas are going to be hit the hardest by the new landings obligation,” he said. “Certainly we don’t believe the cost of implementing this should fall on fishermen.

“In most cases the added fuel costs of transporting the fish will outweigh the price of the fish. There are still huge question marks around the whole implementation of this.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “EU member states have a responsibility to facilitate the disposal of undersized or unmarketable fish and the Scottish Government has issued guidance to the industry and early indications suggest this should not be a major issue.

“Where fishermen do bring undersized fish ashore, we are working with both the fishing and onshore industries to explore all viable disposal options for its use such as fishmeal, bait or compost.

“In addition to this we are considering how we can support the development of new markets for species which are not currently commonly landed but may appear more frequently as a result of the landing obligation.

“We are also developing mechanisms to ensure that financial support is available through the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund and the Scottish Government to fund the necessary investment both within the fleet and onshore to deal with unwanted landings.”