In a press release dated 11 December 2024, the European Council announced its decision on eels.
“Given the continued critical state of European eel, the Council decided to continue the six-month closure period for any commercial eel fishing activities, with certain exemptions already agreed for 2023 and 2024, and to keep prohibiting recreational fisheries.“
It is clear that this decision is a half-measure that in no way removes the uncertainties surrounding this activity, which is vital for a quarter of the small-scale maritime fishing fleet in the Bay of Biscay and essential to the survival of many coastal fleets in the Mediterranean and our inland waters.
The history of the management of diadromous fish stocks such as salmon, sea trout, shad, sea lamprey and eel shows that, without a global vision of all the factors affecting these resources, restoration cannot be achieved simply by regulating or even banning fishing.
History also shows that for these species, the eradication of all professional fishing activity means that these heritage species are forgotten. Even salmon, which enjoys an image as a veritable biological totem, is no exception to this rule. The story of the salmon of the Loire or the Rhine is there to remind us, the species weighing nothing before our appetites to take the river for a simple water supply canal.
The Commission will therefore have to stop asking ICES to provide opinions on a question that ICES cannot answer because the data it gathers is so fragmentary and inconsistent. To continue in this direction is either technocratic blindness or a hidden desire to eradicate fishing.
The Commission’s behind-the-scenes decision to include eels in Appendix I of CITES (prohibited fishing) shows that it has decided to do everything, without assessing the results of management plans, to satisfy certain NGOs for whom environmental protection is a source of publicity or simply a business.
We therefore need to return to the evaluation of management plans as requested by the Van-Ruyssen report of November 2023, validated by the European Parliament, and not to the former Commission’s relentless questioning of groups of experts solely to confirm a position decided in advance: to destroy the small-scale professional fishing sector for this species. This will only accelerate the decline in the species, which currently seems to have stabilised, as evidenced by the substantial arrivals of glass eels in recent years. It will also leave the way clear for the many uses that have destroyed the habitats essential to eel production, particularly in the lower reaches of estuaries, without which the population cannot recover properly.
In 2025, we are therefore insisting on the need to set up a genuine evaluation of the management plans on a European scale, based in particular on a participatory science project involving the use of the knowledge and know-how of the stakeholders in the eel sector to define an active restoration project based on the management of the species and its habitats, taking into account the environmental, social and economic aspects, as required by the definition of sustainable development.
This must be done at Eel Forums organised at European level by the European Union, where all the players will share their knowledge within a framework that, in the case of fishing, will be: ‘Fish less and value more’.