“Leaving the fleet is always a failure because it means that we are resigned to losing work capacity”, estimates Thursday, November 18 on franceinfo Frederic Cuvillier, mayor of Boulogne-sur-mer (Pas-de-Calais) and former Minister of the Sea.
In the fishing dispute between France and the UK, the French government seems ready to back down. At the Assises de la Pêche in Saint-Pol-de-Léon (Finistère), the Minister of the Sea, Annick Girardin announced that a compensation plan was in preparation for French vessels which did not obtain the famous license to continue to fish in UK waters after Brexit. 150 ships are at risk of remaining at the quayside.
franceinfo: How do you take the preparation of this compensation plan for unlicensed boats? Like a failure or do you still believe in a deal?
Frederic Cuvillier: I have always indicated from day one, December 24 of last year, that the negotiation on the fishing side of Brexit was serious for fishermen and that fishermen were being sacrificed. Today, the fleet exit plan is not compensation, it is the scrapping of boats. We are emptying our ports of their fishing capacity, it is an ultimate solution. I know Annick Girardin, I know her will to fight and I salute her and I support her. But the question is elsewhere. Because when there is a situation like the one we are experiencing in the context of Brexit, the fishermen did not ask for anything. They are victims of a bilateral situation between the European Union and the United Kingdom. We must support them other than by breaking their fishing capacity.
So you share the wrath of these fishermen? Olivier Le Nézet, president of the regional fisheries committee of Brittany calls for retaliatory measures. Do you agree, you have to show the muscles on the French side?
Olivier Le Nézet is quite right to point out that it is not by breaking our boats, by scrapping them that we give prospects to fishermen, for young people and for all those who wish to make a living from their work. On the contrary, we must accompany them. It means modernizing the fleet, making fishermen less dependent on the age of the vessels and their energy-intensive nature. We must help young people to resume. We need a support plan for fishermen at European level and not have the first solution to say ‘since we are unable to obtain licenses, we are going to take the boats out of their fishing capacity and scrapping them’.
I was Minister of Transport, the Sea and Fisheries, it was never a good solution. Leaving the fleet is always a failure because it means that we are resigned to losing work capacity and that we are closing ourselves off from development and future prospects. And in this context, at a time when both, said Mr Barnier (the former Brexit negotiator), and all the authorities up to the highest level, were saying that fishing could not be a variable adjustment, we realize that it is an orphan, abandoned cause.
Modernize these vessels, as you ask, but what for, since they will no longer have a license to go fishing in British waters?
Because the fishing capacity exists. Because we need a European agreement on quotas. Because you must not lose your capturing abilities. Because we also need agreements with our British neighbors, in particular on investment funds and on the sharing of investments in fishing fleets. There are solutions. France is preparing to take the presidency of the European Union, President Macron is challenged by the profession. They are right to say that it is an opportunity, indeed, a year after the Brexit agreement, to give perspectives and to give something else as a perspective than to break the boats.