Clashes during a demonstration by fishermen in Rennes, March 22, 2023 (AFP / DAMIEN MEYER)
Muscular demonstration in Rennes, open letter to Emmanuel Macron: French fishermen warn of the future of their profession which they see threatened by a “surge of attacks” reducing their hunting ground and their raison d’être to a trickle .
They were several hundred in Rennes on Wednesday, in a thick cloud of tear gas and under the powerful jets of water cannons to denounce “the regulations and the persecution of the direction of maritime affairs”, but also the price of diesel and the “disengagement” of State. The confrontation, muscular, lasted several hours.
“We would like to make us mad that we would not do better”, summarizes the national fisheries committee in an open letter addressed to President Macron that AFP was able to consult.
Food sovereignty, everyone talks about it, but when it comes to making it a reality, there is no one left”, enrages the chairman of the committee Olivier Le Nézet in this letter.
He evokes “aggressions” that have become “intolerable” because they “call into question the foundation of our profession, feeding the French and the Europeans”, while the French fleet has shrunk by more than a quarter in 20 years and that national fishing represents only 25% of the fish sold on the stalls.
In the background, a sector hard hit by the Covid crisis and then by Brexit, which resulted in 90 ships being sent for scrapping, and more recently by the European Commission’s “action plan” aimed at eliminate bottom fishing (trawls, dredges, etc.) in marine protected areas by 2030.
Monday, a decision of the Council of State set fire to the powder: the highest French administrative court, seized by associations for the defense of the environment, gave six months to the government to close certain fishing areas in the Atlantic. in order to preserve the dolphins whose strandings have multiplied in the Bay of Biscay.
– “Double penalty” –
“For five years, our fishermen have been at the initiative of scientific and technical programs to determine avoidance solutions (repellent sonars, special nets to keep cetaceans away, editor’s note), to reconcile fishing activities and dolphin protection (.. .) The Council of State has just called everything into question,” says Olivier Le Nezet.
Clashes between CRS and demonstrators in Rennes, March 22, 2023 in Ille-et-Vilaine (AFP / DAMIEN MEYER)
Questioned by AFP, Mr. Le Nezet “obviously condemned” the violent outbursts in Rennes – a tractor was launched in the direction of the police – while emphasizing the “distress of an entire profession”.
“Nearly half of the 560 gillnetters in the Bay of Biscay participate in the action plan for dolphins. They are looking for solutions with scientists. This decision by the Council of State is a double penalty,” he says, believing that it is precisely the “good management” of the halieutic resource in the Bay of Biscay which attracts cetaceans and explains at least in part the increase in strandings.
“75% of resources are managed sustainably in Europe, we must do more. But we cannot ask a trawler overnight to turn into a gillnet”, he storms, referring to the European project to ban the bottom trawl in marine protected areas (MPAs).
During the Agricultural Show, Emmanuel Macron assured the fishermen of his support on this file, while the sector is faced with the costly decarbonization of its fleet and faces a recruitment crisis.
The Fisheries Committee estimates that the mere ban on bottom trawls would amount to “making a third of the fleet disappear”, because MPAs currently represent 12% of European waters, but up to “74% of the waters in Brittany”.
Clashes during a demonstration by fishermen in Rennes, March 22, 2023 (AFP / DAMIEN MEYER)
In the Channel, where several areas have sandy bottoms, the committee asks “how to explain to a trawler that it will no longer be able to pass” so as not to damage the bottoms, while “at the slightest hit of tobacco, millions of meters sand cube are moved?”
“We have to do it on a case-by-case basis, examine the particularities of each area”, pleads Olivier Le Nézet. To the president, he asks “a break in this avalanche of bad blows”.
© 2023 AFP
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