Brussels - Europe's fish stocks are desperately over-fished, and the best solution is to scale back the continent's fishing fleets dramatically, the European Union's executive said Wednesday.

"We need to get out of the current situation, where too many fishing vessels are chasing too few fish," EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg told reporters in Brussels.

Close on 90 per cent of Europe's fish species are being pulled out of the water at unsustainable rates, and a third have suffered so heavily that they are in imminent danger of collapse.

And in some areas, fishing fleets are so large that they can catch two or three times more fish than the sea can provide, Borg said as he called on EU member states to devise a new management system.

"This is a decisive moment for the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and I promise to leave no stone unturned," he said, calling for a "new, radically different approach" to fisheries management.

However, he refused to say how deep the cuts to the EU's fleet should be, stressing that any reductions would vary depending on the type of ship, fishing technique and sea area in question.

And he said that any solution would be a complex one, including changes to fleet size, support to coastal communities, and possibly new ways of allocating fishing quotas, among other improvements.

Borg was speaking after the European Commission, the EU's executive, launched a public consultation on how to improve the CFP, with an eye to approving a new, updated system by early 2012.

The EU sets maximum catch levels for the fish in its seas. However, those quotas are traditionally drawn up by fisheries ministers in an end-of-year haggling session which routinely sets the limits high above those recommended by scientists.

As a result, the CFP has long been vilified both by fishermen, who say that it forces them to throw back into the sea valuable fish that they have caught, and by environmentalists, who point out that the CFP has brought Europe's fish stocks to the edge of collapse.

Green pressure groups Greenpeace and the World-wide Fund for Nature (WWF) praised the commission's report, with WWF calling it "commendably honest."

Greenpeace said that any reform should include a 50-per-cent reduction in the size of the EU fishing fleet. (dpa)