Paris, Tuesday 4th August 2009. According to SeafoodSource.com, the French government will invest more than EUR 7 million in a range of projects aimed at reducing the fishing fleet’s fuel consumption.

As part of a bigger sustainable fishing plan announced last year, the government said this month that it had selected 18 projects relating to energy consumption. France’s fishing fleet will instigate ways to use energy more efficiently.

“Fishing trawlers, key consumers of energy, are the principal parties concerned by results of these projects,” said France’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in a statement.

“These projects will provide industry with a set of solutions to improve their profits in the face of fluctuations in price for petrol,” said the ministry.

Included in the projects, also partly funded by European funds for the fishing industry (FEP), are: design modifications to boats to lighten diesel consumption; the development of equipment designed to optimize energy performance; and research for alternative fuel sources such as pure vegetable oil and hydrogen.

Whilst SAR sees this action on the part of the French government as a positive step to enhance awareness of the issue of the sustainability of Europe’s fishing fleets, design and new fuels are not the answer. Abandoning fuel intensive and highly destructive fishing methods, such as bottom trawling, would bring double benefits in terms of reduced fuel consumption (and higher profits for fishermen) and reduced ecosystem damage (thus building up ecosystem resilience.

Past experience has shown that technological improvements, such as the introduction of more fuel efficient engines, does indeed reduce fuel needs, but leads to aggravated overfishing, as fishermen can use the same input of fuel to fish more or further. This puts additional pressure on fish stocks (88% of which, according to the European Commission, are over-exploited in EU waters) and in the long run forces fishermen to deploy more effort to catch the same quantity of fish.

Seas At Risk has drawn attention to the need to switch to fuel saving, low impact fishing techniques in several instances, and is currently producing a report on that very issue, to be published towards the end of 2009.

Together with OCEAN2012, a coalition devoted to transforming European fisheries, Seas At Risk is working towards including fuel consumption as one of the sustainability criteria used to grant access to fisheries resources under a revised Common Fisheries Policy.

In addition to that, Seas At Risk is organising a conference to talk about sustainable fleets on Wednesday 21st October in Brussels, to which interested NGOs, industry and media are very welcome to participate. The conference will focus on the Common Fisheries Policy reform process and discussions will include the social, environmental and economic aspects and implications of a sustainable fleet.

Photograph by A. Bijukumar/Marine Photobank

Link to SAR Carbon Footprint brochure

Information on SAR conference

OCEAN 2012 website