Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

FISHING

Grey seals thriving in Danish waters tip scales against fisherman

Grey seal populations in Danish areas of the Wadden Sea are on the increase, but their presence is less than swimming news for fishermen.

Published: 28 August 2017 12:13 CEST
Grey seals thriving in Danish waters tip scales against fisherman
Photo: michaklootwijk/Depositphotos

The numbers of the seals in the Wadden Sea has reached a record high in 2017, reports news agency Ritzau.

While the numbers of the seal are highest in the Dutch and German parts of the sea, they are also growing in Denmark, at the cost of the more common harbour seal, according to the report.

5,445 grey seals were counted in the Wadden Sea in 2017, a ten percent increase from last year.

221 of these were counted in the Danish part of the sea – a 50 percent increase.

No seals of the species at all lived in the sea 10-15 years ago.

“There is clearly growth in the Danish part of the sea, and a couple of years ago we saw the first birth in the area,” Jonas Teilmann of Aarhus University’s Department of Bioscience told Ritzau.

The grey seal, which can weigh up to 300kg, consumes much more than the smaller harbour seal, getting through five kilo of fish every day – if it doesn’t hunt alternative sustenance.

“We have seen several examples of grey seals killing harbour seals and eating them. They are larger and very aggressive. Some of them have possibly even specialised in harbour seals and also porpoises and even grey seal pups. They take a bit of everything,” Teilmann continued.

Other parts of Denmark’s coastal waters, including the Limfjorden waterway and waters off Bornholm, have also seen an increase in grey seals – often to the chagrin of local fisherman.

The appetite of the seals reduces the size of catches that can be made by commercial net fishing boats in the areas.

The seals also damage nets and eat the parts of the fish they like most, according to the report.

In 2016, minister for food and the environment Esben Lunde Larsen – who recently lost fishing from his ministerial portfolio after a political scandal over fishing quotas – gave dispensation for licensed hunters and fisherman to shoot 40 of the otherwise protected grey seals.

But no grey seals have as yet been reported as having been culled in the Bornholm and Christiansø areas, where the problem is said to be at its worst.

Biologist Bo Håkansson of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation told Ritzau that, although they did not affect cod fishing in the North Sea, grey seals were a problem for net fisherman due to their tendency to eat through the nets.

“Fishing with fixed nets is the most [environmentally] protective form of fishing,” he commented.

READ ALSO: Denmark gets two new world heritage sites

FISHING

ANALYSIS: ‘We’re ready for war’ – How far will France’s post-Brexit fishing row with Jersey go?

War has been declared between France (population 66,000,000) and the Bailiwick of Jersey (population not quite 100,000), writes John Lichfield as he examines the gravity of the latest cross-Channel fishing flare up.

Published: 5 May 2021 16:01 CEST
Updated: 6 May 2021 13:25 CEST
ANALYSIS: 'We're ready for war' - How far will France's post-Brexit fishing row with Jersey go?
Photo: Fred Tanneau/AFP

For now, it is a war of words. However, the French minister for the sea, no less, has warned that she will, if necessary, switch off the lights in France’s tiny, troublesome near neighbour.

Over 90 percent of the tiny UK crown dependancy’s electricity comes through three cables from France just over 12 miles away.

What’s it all about? Fish of course. And Brexit.

Who is right and who is wrong?

It is complicated. Fisheries are always complicated, even slippery.

There is some right and some wrong on both sides but, as far as I can establish, the Jersey government has behaved oddly – provocatively and with less than complete honesty. There is no similar problem between France and the other big Channel Island, Guernsey.

The French government suspects that Boris Johnson’s government has engineered the dispute as part of a wider campaign of minor harassment of French fishing boats to distract from its own surrender on fisheries rights in the Brexit deal just before Christmas.

The UK government says that fisheries rights in Jersey waters are an entirely an affair for the island’s (or bailwick’s) government. Britain is responsible only for the Channel Islands’ diplomatic relations and has been seeking to broker a deal for Jersey with the EU and France.

That may be legally correct. The Channel Islands are the only fragment of Duke William’s dukedom to have remained independent of France. They are “owned” by the Queen but they are not part of the UK and were never part of the European Union.

The present dispute has similarities, however, with a completely unnecessary spat engineered recently by the British government over the details of post-Brexit, French access to the waters between 6 and 12 miles off the English coast. In both cases, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) speaks of “unfortunate misunderstandings” over the details of licencing arrangements for French fishing boats.

I would be happy to accept such assurances from Defra if it did not have such a long record of lying about fishing – especially under its present Secretary of State, George Eustice. 

Defra over-fished its “trust us” quota long ago.

On the other hand, the French are not entirely blameless. It was somewhat excessive of Annick Girardin, the minister for maritime affairs, to threaten to turn off Jersey’s lights while the dispute is still under discussion. Some of the nationalist rhetoric of fishermen’s leaders and local politicians in Normandy and especially Brittany has also gone off the deep end.

In essence, the dispute has nothing to do with Brexit and is everything to do with Brexit.

The complex pattern of fishing rights around and in between the Channel Islands has been a vexed question for centuries. Such rights were outside the EU Common Fisheries Policy.

In 2000, Britain and the Channel Islands government signed an agreement with France (The Treaty of the Bay of Granville) which established a pattern of rights for French boats up to 3 miles from the islands’ coasts. Last year, Britain and the islands said they were terminating the treaty as part of the “it’s all our fish now” policy as the end of Brexit transition approached. An interim deal was reached.

Despite anxious complaints by Norman and Breton fishermen and politicians, the question of the Îles Anglo-Normandes was not addressed in the final flurry of Brexit trade negotiations in December. Last month it seemed this had finally been settled.  French boats which had habitually fished in Channel Islands waters would automatically be licensed to continue doing so.

Over 250 Norman and Breton fishing boats rely on their catches around the islands – an industry which supports 900 families and 2,000 jobs on sea and land. At the same time, Channel Islands boats depend almost entirely on their rights to sell fish in Granville, Cherbourg and other French ports.

When they examined the licences issued by the Jersey government last Friday, however, French fishermen found they bore no relation to what had been promised. The licences varied, with no apparent logic, between the right to fish for 170 days a year and the right to fish for seven days.

Claude La Vaullée, a Norman skipper who has fished off Jersey for 40 years, found that his boat, Le Cach, had been given the right to fish for 11 hours a year. He told the regional newspaper Ouest France, that he and other skippers had now equipped their vessels to “re-stage the Battle of Trafalgar”.

Such restrictions were not mentioned in the negotiations and were not communicated to Paris or Brussels, French officials say. They were a unilateral decision by the Jersey government.

David Sellam, head of the joint Normany-Brittany sea authority, said : “We are confronted by people who are not trustworthy. Jersey has been taken over by an extremist fringe, who want to reduce French fishing access and profit from Brexit.

“We’re ready for war. We can bring Jersey to its knees if necessary.”

Jersey politicians say it’s all a big misunderstanding (which suggests that they are preparing to climb down). The external Relations Minister Ian Gorst told the BBC yesterday that the licences issued last Friday were based on proof of past fishing activities. But there was no time limit, he said. The French fishing industry could provide more evidence if they needed extra, or more generous, licences.

Do the French fishermen have such evidence easily available? Some do and some perhaps don’t.

But all fishing activity is now so strictly regulated that it should not be difficult – if there is goodwill on all sides – for the French government to provide reasonable proof.

Is there goodwill on the Jersey and UK side? I expect that the threat of black-outs (however excessive the threat) will concentrate minds in Saint-Helier.

I suspect this dispute will not last long.

SHOW COMMENTS