Status: 03/12/2023 11:05 a.m
Coastal fishing in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is as good as dead. Catch quotas and bans make it almost impossible to operate the trade adequately. Oliver Greve from the Wismar fishing cooperative wants to reinvent the profession from scratch.
Herrings have been exported from Wismar to many European countries since the 11th century. Today, annual catch quotas and bans make it difficult for coastal fishermen to do their job properly. Oliver Greve, Managing Director of the Wismar Bay Fishing Cooperative, knows this too, and explains it using herring as an example: “The quantities that are currently being approved mean that a fisherman is allowed to fish 600 to 800 herrings, for example. That’s a joke, of which you can no one live.”
Many stop, almost no one moves up
The cod may no longer be fished in a targeted manner. With him, the profession of fisherman is also acutely threatened. “In the 1990s there were 1,600 fishermen in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Now there are fewer than 200, few of them full-time,” says Greve. Some of the fishermen are looking for a second source of income, selling fish sandwiches, for example. Others give up or retire early. The average age of fishermen in the country is now 57, says Greve. There is an almost complete lack of offspring: there is only one coastal fisherman trainee in all of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
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New fisherman profession: Forester of the Sea
Oliver Greve and his colleagues do not want to accept this situation and are looking for solutions. They believe that the profession has to be reinvented from scratch. For Greve, the fisherman of the future is a so-called sea ranger, a kind of forester of the sea. In addition to fishing, its tasks should include environmental protection, maintenance of marine fish stocks, management of aquaculture and, last but not least, tourism offers and the maintenance of the cultural heritage of coastal fishing. The payment of the sea rangers – like that of the foresters – would have to come at least in part from the state.
The state government takes the idea seriously
According to Greve’s model, there would first have to be further training for existing fishermen and, in the next step, a completely new apprenticeship: “This new fisherman with this new training should then shape a new job profile, which will hopefully be attractive for young people again.” In this way, the fishermen near the coast can be preserved, so Greves hopes.
The head of the cooperative has already spoken to representatives of the state government about his plans. They should already be the subject of a panel of experts in the Ministry of Agriculture in Schwerin in April.
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