Tossed around, mistreated and accused of every kind of turpitude, small-scale continental, estuarine, lagoon and coastal professional fishermen are more than fed up with being the scapegoats of a European administration that only listens to environmental or industrial lobbies, without taking into account the distress of many fishing communities who are simply suffering from environmental degradation that Europe and its member states have not been able to control.
It’s time for those who administer us to get out in the field and leave behind this sectoral vision and centralized, technocratic governance that has been going nowhere for decades.
We can see on the ground, where we are all the time, that many uses other than fishing in no way moderate their ecological footprint. The latest report from the European Environment Agency is clear on this point: nothing is improving, and worse, the environmental situation is deteriorating!
So it’s time for us to say STOP! The European Parliament has to take over the management of eel restoration in its area of distribution in accordance with regulation 1100/2007 on the restoration and management of the species. A tool which has been widely discussed with stakeholders and which advocates a global vision.
The Van-Ruyssen report of November 2023 is clear. Fishing sector has achieved its objectives, but other uses have not!
Conclusion: the European Commission must not continue to attack fishing, and even less indirectly, as it is doing within the framework of CITES, by encouraging the listing of the species in Appendix I.
Hence our proposal to organize an International Meeting on the European eel, bringing together all the stakeholders involved to review eel management plans, as requested by our representatives to the European Parliament.
Fishing communities know how to organize such meetings, and have already done so, notably at the 2009 Rencontres Internationales de la Petite Pêche Professionnelle Maritime et Continentale in Biarritz.
This will finally give us a global, unbiased view of the state of the eel resource and its habitats, rather than a pseudo-expertise that leads nowhere except to make an activity disappear, without proposing any reliable solutions for the future of this resource.