A real gray tide. Tens of thousands of dead fish floating off La Rochelle (Charente-Maritime), in the Bay of Biscay, were photographed and filmed on Thursday February 3 by the NGO Sea Shepherd France. The person responsible for this carnage is a giant trawler, The Margiris, one of the largest fishing vessels in the world, which discarded over 100,000 blue whiting. Franceinfo returns to questions about this case.
1What do the images of the NGO show?
“Here’s what’s happening right now in the Bay of Biscay”, commented the NGO Sea Shepherd by revealing this incident, photos and video in support, on Thursday. The association’s images, posted on Twitter, show an expanse of dead, scum-like gray fish. “After verification, the thousands of dead fish are blue whiting”, specifies the association, adding that this species, subject to fishing quotas, is used in particular for making surimi.
This is what is happening right now in the Bay of Biscay off La Rochelle. Four factory ships operate in the area, including the Margiris, the second largest trawler in the world (banned in Australia). pic.twitter.com/nA64Fm7VlC
— Sea Shepherd France (@SeaShepherdFran) February 3, 2022
The impressive pictures were massively taken up, arousing indignation. The journalist Hugo Clément, host of the program “Sur le front” (on France 5) devoted to environmental subjects, for example questioned Twitter the Minister of the Sea, Annick Girardin. She first reacted by assuring to be “shocked” by these pictures and asked “to the National Fisheries Monitoring Center (CNSP) to shed light on this subject in order to identify the causes of these significant discards of fish”.
2What happened ?
According to the ministry, contacted by franceinfo, “It would be an accidental rupture of the trawl which would have led to this rejection of 50 tons of fish in the sea”, involuntary.
“These images remain shocking but we cannot say, for the moment, that it is voluntary or that it is wasteful.”
The Ministry of the Seaat franceinfo
“The ship identified itself at the end of the race. The shipowner recognized an accident on board, it was a net that dropped”, Annick Girardin explained to the press on Friday in Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). “The accident was declared in the logbook, she added, dead fish will be removed from the boat’s quota.” “In accordance with European legislation, the event as well as the quantities caught have been (…) reported to the Lithuanian authorities, the country of registration of the vessel”, specified for its part the European association of pelagic freezer trawlers (PFA), in a press release issued Thursday evening.
Annick Girardin announced that an administrative investigation had been launched to shed light on this incident. She promised that in the event of a proven breach, “sanctions would be taken against the shipowner responsible”.
3What does the NGO Sea Shepherd think?
The version put forward by the ship does not convince the association. According to the president of Sea Shepherd France, Lamya Essemlali, this tide of dead fish could be due to “bycatch”. “Bycatch is the act of catching another species of fish than the one of interest and throwing it back into the sea. However, this practice is illegal”, she explains to franceinfo.
European law states that “only a 5% exemption is authorized, for cases where individuals of another species slip into the school of the target species”, recall on Twitter MEP Pierre Karleskind, Chairman of the Committee on Fisheries (Pech) in the European Parliament. Translation : “If you want to catch mackerel, and you catch 95% of it and you have 5% sardine, you have the right to discard it, but you have to declare it, explains Lamya Essemlali. However, in the case of Margiris, we are well beyond 5%.
In theory, the vessel has an obligation to disembark and report its bycatch, but it does not always do so. “We are forced to take at face value what the shipowners say because we lack control”, underlines to franceinfo the president of the NGO. “A shipowner has every interest in releasing at sea because in terms of fishing, it’s ‘not seen, not caught’.”
The association also points out that the trajectory at sea of the ship does not corroborate the accidental cause put forward. “We would also like to know the time at which the incident was recorded”, adds Lamya Essemlali. On Twitter, the association of pelagic freezer trawlers (PFA) assures that the incident took place “at 5:50 a.m. GMT (6:50 a.m. French time)”. Furthermore, “if it is indeed a trawl break, it is surprisingly fragile and that also raises questions”, judge Lamya Essemlali.
4What are the issues raised by this case?
The images filmed by Sea Shepherd France mainly highlight the presence of factory ships in French waters. the Margiris has gigantic measurements: more than 140 meters long and over 9,000 tons, with a 600-meter net that can cover up to 200 meters in width, as shown in an infographic from the Parisian. “These are large fishing vessels on which the European Commission imposes annual fishing quotas”, explains the ministry.
With such sizes, these boats have disproportionate fishing capacities compared to small fishermen on the French or European coasts. The daily fish catch is in the hundreds of tons. “This is what the sixty small fishermen of Trouville catch, but in one year”, underlined in November 2019 at The cross Dimitri Rogoff, president of the Normandy regional fisheries committee. “Although they are within their rights, the Margiris and the Annie Hillina [un chalutier géant allemand] can collect 250 tons of fish in one day, the equivalent of the annual total of five Norman boats”, had already written Hervé Morin, the president of the Normandy region, in 2019 in a letter to the Minister of Agriculture at the time.
the Margiris was also in the sights of environmentalists, especially British, who accuse him of “ruin the seabed”, reports France 3 Nouvelle-Aquitaine. In September 2012, Australia banned the factory ship from fishing off Tasmania. For the president of Sea Shepherd, the French authorities are demonstrating “laxity” in the matter. “We have to wonder about the legalization of such ships, we have the longest coastline in Europe, we should be exemplary”, she believes. “From the 1970s until today, Europe has chosen to manage fishing through a system of quotas allocated to Member States (…) We must now go further by looking at the size of vessels and harmful fishing techniques”, insisted Frédéric Le Manach, scientific director of the Bloom association, to The cross.
The presence of these giant ships off the French coast also damages the entire food chain of the oceans since the fish caught in huge quantities are the prey of marine predators, such as dolphins.