For 2023, all our best wishes:

• with a little more realism for the managers of our aquatic environments at national and European levels who consider fishing as the only adjustment variable to the overexploitation of our continental, interface and coastal ecosystems;
• with a little more sagacity, so that they stop believing or pretending to believe that stopping fishing will solve the plundering of our aquatic environments by multiple uncontrolled uses: coastal development, embankment of estuaries, hydroelectricity production, drinking water supply, irrigation, purification, intensive agriculture;
• with a little more objectivity regarding the real remedies that need to be implemented, taking into account the fact that the ban on salmon fishing in the Loire for more than 30 years has not stopped the decline in this population due to the failure to restore its breeding habitats and the slowing down of its migration towards well-oxygenated spawning grounds; that the ban on shad fishing for more than 15 years in the Gironde-Garonne-Dordogne basin has not solved the problem of its decline; that the virtual cessation of eel fishing in the Rhone basin has not masked the negative consequences for the species of the artificialization of its habitats and the chemical degradation of aquatic environments; that if we are not careful, our migratory populations will be replaced by exotic species better adapted to this degradation of our environments in the context of climate change.
• Finally, with a little more listening and consideration of the knowledge and know-how of professional fishermen who are the first victims of this degradation of the environments they have been using in a sustainable manner for many decades and whose knowledge cannot be ignored if we want to implement an active restoration of our large migratory species.

The AFPMAR, in support of the official structures of the fishing industry and the eel sector, will be very attentive from now on to the efforts that must be made so that in Europe, the objectives of the Framework Directives on Water, Habitats and the Marine Environment are finally achieved and not constantly postponed indefinitely.