Fishermen will be able to continue to draw their trawls on the bottoms of officially protected marine areas in the European Union. Tuesday, May 3, during a vote in plenary in Parliament in Strasbourg, 319 deputies voted against the proposal of the deputy Caroline Roose (Greens-European Free Alliance) which calls for the prohibition of this technique “in all marine protected areas [AMP] » ; 280 MEPs voted in favor and 35 abstained. Non-selective and damaging to seagrasses and other marine habitats, this technique is controversial. NGOs frequently devote accusatory reports to him. A petition bearing 150,000 signatures and calling for his banishment was submitted in December 2021 to the European Commission.
In 2020, the latter announced in its biodiversity strategy its ambition to protect 30% of land and seas by 2030 – like the French government moreover –, of which at least a third in a “strict” to halt species decline. On a global scale, the objective is also on the program of the next world conference on the subject, scheduled for the end of the year. Parliamentarians had the opportunity to work to start implementing it in European marine protected areas. That’s not what they decided.
Contrary to what their name might suggest, MPAs are currently not regulated as spaces to be preserved from any form of human activity that is harmful to ecosystems. In fact, they are generally managed with the idea of bringing together all sorts of uses: transport, tourism, nautical activities, and of course fishing.
“Protected” but unrestricted areas
The France Nature Environnement federation has thus calculated that in the Bay of Biscay, boats that practice destructive techniques (such as trawling, but also the use of very large nets) operated, in 2018 for example, for more than 174,000 hours in protected areas, compared to 235,000 hours outside these areas. In 2021, 33.7% of French waters were classified, but 12.5% of them did not impose more rules inside the MPA than around, reports a study by researcher Joachim Claudet (CNRS). -PSL University of Paris). And only 1.6% were protected in the strict sense.
It is to these hearts of marine parks or nature reserves that the Macronist MEP Pierre Karleskind (Renew Europe), who chairs the Committee on Fisheries in the European Parliament, wishes to limit a possible exemption from bottom trawling. “While the ban generally already applies in these spaces, even if there is no uniform rule in the European Union”, replies Caroline Roose. The elected representatives of the European People’s Party (EPP) did not want the latter’s proposal either. They ensured that its request to ban bottom trawling in all MPAs was separated from the initiative report devoted to the blue economy, in which it had slipped. This text by Social Democrat MP Isabel Carvalhais, focused on the protection of the ocean, sailors, but also biodiversity, was adopted by the Fisheries Committee in March and in plenary on May 3.
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