Victory for environmental protection associations: the Council of State ordered the government to close certain fishing areas in the Atlantic in order to preserve the dolphins whose strandings in the Bay of Biscay have multiplied.
From the end of February, Emmanuel Macron had admitted the need for France to “improve (its) practices” to better protect the dolphins, a considerable number of which find themselves trapped in the nets of fishermen, before coming to wash up on the beaches. of the Atlantic coast.
The Council of State had been seized in 2021 by several environmental defense associations – France Nature environment (FNE), Sea Shepherd France and the association for the defense of aquatic environments (DMA) – which demanded suspensions of fishing in the Atlantic.
The highest administrative court therefore agreed with them and granted the government six months to implement these bans.
They must be added to the “acoustic deterrent devices by fishing boats which have already been deployed”, indicated the jurisdiction.
The Council of State justifies the use of these bans because the current measures “do not make it possible to guarantee a favorable conservation status for species of small cetaceans”, two of which – the common dolphin and the harbor porpoise – are threatened with extinction, “at least regionally”.
“It is of course an important day for all those who love the sea and the few people who have invested their lives in this fight”, greeted DMA.
Sea Shepherd France called this decision a “historic victory”. “The government is forced to close the most destructive fisheries”, rejoiced the NGO which recalls that “this winter again a new intense episode of mortality of common dolphins is observed”.
“This decision is incomprehensible and will have irreversible effects on French fishing”, alerted via a press release the president of the National Fisheries Committee Olivier Le Nezet, who indicated that he had asked to meet the Minister of Agriculture “urgently” in order to to analyze “the impact of this decision”.
“If it is not compensated, it will not be viable, and the State will have to have a substantial checkbook because the closure will leave more than 500 ships at the quay and it is the whole industry that will drink, economically c It’s a disaster”, reacted to AFP Olivier Mercier, fishing boss based in Arcachon whose ships are equipped with a dolphin repelling device.
According to the LPO, “nearly 1,000 cetacean corpses have been found on the Atlantic coast since December”.
“The Council of State is finally putting an end to the odious agony of dolphins” as it did for “glue trapping (hunting birds with glue, editor’s note), traditional hunts and many other files which participated in the mistreatment of biodiversity”, welcomed the president of the LPO, Allain Bougrain-Dubourg.
In a report published in early February, the Pelagis observatory, which has been recording cetacean strandings on the Atlantic coast since 1970, points out that the population of dolphins in the Northeast Atlantic has been decreasing for several years and “could die out here 40 to 50 years” if nothing is done.
Pelagis estimated the dolphin population at around 200,000 individuals in 2011/12. In 2020, 1,299 common dolphins were found dead on the French coast, a figure that fell to 669 in 2022.
But, knowing that more than 80% of dead dolphins sink or decompose at sea rather than stranding, the annual mortality on the Atlantic coasts is estimated between 8,000 and 11,000 individuals.
According to the Council of State, the number of dolphin deaths by accidental capture in the Bay of Biscay “exceeds the maximum limit each year to ensure a favorable conservation status in the North-East Atlantic”.
“The accidental capture control system put in place remains insufficient to know their extent even more precisely”, he also notes.
It therefore ordered additional measures “to make it possible to estimate more precisely the number of annual captures of small cetaceans” and to continue “strengthening the observation system at sea”.
03/20/2023 20:40:14 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
