Home » Small fishermen left ashore by the pandemic and European subsidies – Mickaël Correia

Small fishermen left ashore by the pandemic and European subsidies – Mickaël Correia

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Small fishermen left ashore by the pandemic and European subsidies – Mickaël Correia

In April 2020, Europe fully experienced the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic. The majority of the population of the old continent has been subjected to strict confinement. A hard blow for the fishing sector, which has seen its boats forced to remain in port, and its workers forced into inactivity. For small-scale fishermen who are already struggling to survive economically, the loss of turnover was expected to be fatal.

In the face of this economic crisis, the European Commission proposed on April 2, 2020 to modify the rules of the European funds for maritime affairs and fisheries (Feamp) to urgently release subsidies for the temporary arrest of seafarers. From this arose a regulation that left each member state free to decide the criteria for awarding these aids linked to covid-19. Heavyweights in the fishing industry have thrown themselves headlong into this providential boon of public money.

First come first served
In France, a country that has one of the largest fleets in the European Union, industrial fishing companies have appropriated these covid-19 allowances en masse, to the detriment of small-scale fishermen. In the Netherlands, the member state that owns the largest industrial vessels in Europe, 254 large ships have been wrongly obtained nearly six million euros in subsidies.

The French Ministry of Fisheries published on April 29, 2020 the decree specifying the conditions necessary for employees in the sector to benefit from these allowances related to covid-19.

But according to a recent scientific study conducted by Bloom, an NGO committed against the destruction of the oceans and fishermen, the text, which is based among other things on the principle of “first come, first served”, was extremely favorable to large groups industrialists who, thanks to the considerable administrative resources at their disposal, were able to quickly prepare admissible applications, unlike small businesses, which do not have the same human and legal skills. The result? “Few organized companies have managed to grab most of the required grants, while the vast majority of French fishermen have not applied (or have done so unsuccessfully),” says Bloom

Small fishing vessels less than ten meters long, while representing over 70 per cent of the French fleet, received only 5.4 per cent of the total EU subsidies granted to France, amounting to eight hundred thousand euros. In addition, 82.5 percent of offsets related to Covid-19 were intercepted by fishing vessels that use destructive fishing methods for marine ecosystems, such as trawling, dredging and purse seine fishing.

These fishing practices are known to be the most catastrophic for biodiversity, because they rake the seabed or because they are so efficient that they reduce populations of marine species in a very short time. French fleets using these ecosystem-destructive fishing techniques have received a total compensation of € 12.2 million under the aid for Covid-19. Seven companies representing less than 1 per cent of the French fleet, that is about fifty vessels, received 28.5 per cent of all compensation.

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An important tuna vessel of almost ninety meters in length, which uses a devastating fishing method, which surrounds and concentrates the fish – the purse seine (ocianciolo) – received the largest allowance: 272,425 euros in public aid. The tuna vessel belongs to Sapmer, an industrial group based on the island of Réunion, and which historically is the company that deals with large-scale fishing in the waters of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. The company belongs to Jacques d’Armand de Chateauvieux, heir to the Bourbon sugar mills and today one of the greatest French fortunes. “The compensation related to covid-19 and received by this vessel alone is equivalent to more than a third of the sum paid to all vessels less than ten meters long”, explains Frédéric Le Manach, scientific director of Bloom.

Contacted by Mediapart, the French ministry for the sea said: “Since the largest companies are directly affected by the disturbances in the sector, it is not unusual that they have made greater appeal to the state to overcome this crisis”. And he added: “Since the largest boats depend on the largest number of jobs, they have naturally requested this help on a large scale.” A statement that does not take into account the fact that small-scale fishing alone is responsible for 52% of the employment of the entire sector in France.

Out of control
While France is known for hoarding public aid for the benefit of the intensive fishing industry, the Netherlands has been responsible, to varying degrees, for massive subsidy fraud. “The Netherlands has the specificity of having acquired the largest industrial fleets on the European continent”, continues Frédéric Le Manach. “It is a country where the fishing industry has always resorted to tricks regarding the size of the fish caught, the declared power of the boat’s engine, the size of the fishing nets and so on. In short, fraud is a key component of the business model that underpins the strength of the Dutch industrial fisheries ”.

In this country, the conditions for granting the temporary suspension of activities were set by a ministerial order of 13 May 2020. The Dutch government has imposed, in its criteria, that only boats over 12 meters in length can benefit from the help. This condition has actually favored industrial vessels, when in fact small-scale coastal fishing represents 41 per cent of the country’s fleet. Another criterion for the granting of aid was that the compensation was paid on condition of demonstrating periods of suspension of activities of seven consecutive days, and that the maximum amount granted per ship was 44 thousand euros.

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To demonstrate every week they went without work, Dutch fishermen had to keep their vessels’ satellite monitoring system (vms) on throughout the compensation period, which ran from May to December 2020. However, since the vms data does not are public, Mediapart and Bloom have considered another geolocation device, the automatic identification system (ais). The data collected with the ais are readily available, and according to European legislation this mandatory surveillance tool must be operational day and night for any vessel longer than fifteen meters.

Of the 269 Dutch fishing vessels that received public aid related to Covid-19, 254 could be tracked with this system throughout the compensation period. And the results are clear.

Firstly, according to AIS data, only 5 per cent of industrial vessels – just 12 in total – met the two conditions set by the Netherlands to receive compensation related to covid-19, namely the obligation to justify periods of inactivity for seven consecutive days and to always keep a geolocation tool switched on. For these 12 boats, the rest periods displayed with ais correspond to the weeks for which compensation is paid.

On the 95 per cent of fishing vessels that did not comply with the legislation, or 242 vessels, by crossing the data of some Dutch fish markets – a sign that the fishery products were sold by these vessels in the midst of the pandemic – and the geolocations of the AIS, At least 145 fishing vessels were found to be responsible for scams, as they did not actually stop during the weeks for which they received compensation.
The other boats had intermittently turned on their AIS systems. This practice is contrary to European legislation and makes it more difficult to know whether they were at berth or at sea. However, only 25 of these boats had their ais turned on long enough to show that they remained inactive. Of all these vessels, 72 could be suspected of wrongdoing as their ais operated too sporadically to demonstrate mooring periods. In summary, 95 per cent of the Dutch fishing fleet that received compensation related to covid-19 did not comply with the rules to varying degrees and unduly received a total of € 5.8 million in public aid.

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“The French and Dutch decrees on the conditions necessary for the granting of covid-19 aid show us that there is no complicity but a ‘consanguinity’ between states and their industrial fleets”, explains Claire Nouvian, founder of Bloom and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2018. “The functioning of the fishing industry is so dependent on public aid that the sector has penetrated every step of the decision-making process within European states and institutions to monopolize subsidies. This has meant that public authorities have become a tailor made to measure for the sector’s desire to exploit the oceans beyond all limits ”.

Another conclusion of the data analyzed by Mediapart and Bloom is that the maximum amount of 44 thousand euros has been granted almost forty times to boats practicing almost exclusively the ecologically harmful techniques of trawling and purse seine.

Even worse, 29 percent of the aid related to Covid-19 was paid to vessels that still used electric fishing. Although this destructive industrial method has been progressively banned in the EU since 2019, the Netherlands were the only ones in the EU to make use of exemptions to be able to use this technique before it was definitively banned in 2021.

Urged by Mediapart, the Dutch ministry responsible for fisheries stated that “we have no reason to assume that large-scale fraud has occurred. […] The legality of all covid-19 grants awarded is monitored. If it is found that the conditions are not met, measures will be taken. For now, there is no reason to do so ”.

“France and the Netherlands have a long tradition of controlling the oceans. In the seventeenth century the Netherlands was the world‘s leading economic power thanks to their maritime supremacy, ”notes Claire Nouvian. “This historical hegemony means that the productivist culture of the fishing giants has permeated everything, from ministries to training courses for maritime professions. As for the protection of the oceans, which is an essential issue for the climate and biodiversity, great efforts will be needed to get rid of the pro-industrial resistance within the public authorities ”.

On 1 July, the United Nations conference on oceans ends in Lisbon, with the aim of “arriving at collective solutions to save the blue lungs of the planet, endangered by human activities”.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)

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