By Tim Hirsch BBC environment correspondent in Brussels

The Christmas season in Brussels sees the historic city centre transformed into a festive outdoor market, complete with open-air ice skating and a giant wheel.

Over in the city's concrete Euro zone, another, less appealing Christmas tradition was played out: the annual haggling over European Union fishing quotas.

EU fisheries ministers gather here each December to decide on what level of fishing should be allowed for the following year.

Inevitably, they stay up all night engaging in a bizarre auction, in which one species is played off against another until a deal acceptable to all can be thrashed out.

Fierce arguments

This system has led to ever more dire warnings about the perilous state of many fish stocks, while European fishing communities claim the bureaucratic rules are squeezing them out of existence.

The appropriately-named EU Fisheries Commissioner, Franz Fischler, is desperately trying to replace this ritual with longer-term measures to enable depleted stocks to recover and to make a viable fishing industry possible for the future.

But Mr Fischler's attempts at this year's meeting to introduce such a change became mired in fierce arguments about how fishing activity should be constrained, and how drastic next year's cuts need to be.

For the second year running, ministers were negotiating against the background of advice from scientists that fishing for cod and some other species should be suspended entirely in the North and Irish Seas.

The EU wants to prevent a total collapse in cod stocks

Otherwise, they caution, stocks could collapse completely, as they did off Newfoundland, in Canada, in the early 1990s.

That option was a political non-starter.

Instead, the Commission proposed expanding temporary measures imposed last year, in which fishermen in North Sea ports have had to tie up their boats on certain days of every month.

It is also suggesting draconian steps to clamp down on cheating, which the present system is poorly equipped to prevent.

As with all EU negotiations, these proposals were chewed over and mauled in complex talks, and what emerged at the end inevitably involved compromise.

Long-term plan

The tactic employed by the Commission was to suggest that if ministers could agree on the long-term recovery plan, which would start in 2005, there could be more flexibility on quotas for next year.

But fishing organisations lobbying the meeting warned that the new system, with its restrictions on the number of days at sea, would simply continue the centralised command-and-control regime that has failed to conserve European fish stocks.