Fishing: NGO Bloom sued after publication of list of "destructive" vessels

This summons to appear before the Paris judicial court follows Bloom's publication in March of a "red list" of around 4,000 vessels , including nearly 600 French boats, accused of trawling in marine protected areas (MPAs). A practice denounced as "destructive" by the NGO but legal in most French MPAs.

"This red list of so-called 'destructive vessels,' riddled with errors and revised several times, has outraged our profession," said Olivier Le Nézet, president of the National Committee for Maritime Fisheries and Marine Farming (CNPMEM), in a press release. He denounced the "unacceptable practices of the Bloom association," which cast "opprobrium on an entire profession."

This list "gives a distorted presentation of reality, resulting from an erroneous methodology and the extrapolation of irrelevant data from the automatic vessel identification system," states the CNPMEM, for whom the presence at a given time of a vessel in a sector does not provide information on its activity.

"The red list includes, for example, fishing vessels that do not engage in trawling, vessels less than 9 meters long, and even foreign naval vessels," the committee points out.

The National Fisheries Committee, all the regional committees, as well as the departmental committees of Brittany, which are bringing the appeal, believe that "the call to boycott the production of many French vessels" by Bloom - who has ordered distributors to stop sourcing from trawlers fishing in MPAs - "constitutes a clear situation of denigration against the interests" of fishermen.

Bloom has been campaigning for years for stronger protection of marine protected areas. Currently, only 1.6% of the surface area of ​​French MPAs benefits from strong protection —and even 0.1% for metropolitan waters alone.