Community supplies of certain fishery products currently depend on imports from third countries. In the last 10 years the EU self-sufficiency rate for fishery products has decreased from 57 % to 36 %. It is in the Community’s interest to suspend in part or in whole the customs duties for those products, within Community tariff quotas of an appropriate volume. In order not to jeopardise the Community production of fishery products and to ensure an adequate supply to the EU processing industry, such tariff quotas should be opened in accordance with the sensitivity of the product in question on the Community market. It is therefore appropriate to open such tariff quotas for the period 2010 to 2012, applying a reduction or elimination of customs duties.

Equal and uninterrupted access to those tariff quotas should be ensured for all Community importers and the rates laid down for the quotas should be applied without interruption to all imports of the products concerned into all Member States until the tariff quotas have been used up.

To ensure the efficiency of a common management of the tariff quotas, Member States should be permitted to draw from the quota amount the necessary quantities corresponding to their actual imports. Since that method of management requires close cooperation between the Member States and the Commission, the latter should in particular be able to monitor the rate at which the quotas are used up and should inform the Member States accordingly.

Therefore, Regulation (EC) No 824/2007 should be repealed with effect from 1 January 2010.

Given the urgency of the matter, it is important to grant an exception to the six-week period referred to in paragraph I(3) of the Protocol on the role of national parliaments in the European Union annexed to the Treaty on European Union and to the Treaties establishing the European Communities,