From the hushed interior of his fish restaurant in Wladyslawowo, a seaside resort on the Polish coast, about fifty kilometers north of Gdansk, Rafal Golla, who has been casting his nets into the sea for three decades, dreams of only one thing: scrapping his boat and receiving funding from the European Union for the retraining of Baltic Sea fishermen. “I hope to be able to do it by the beginning of 2025. Going out to sea for a few sprats, what's the point? I just go out to sea for the statutory ninety days a year to claim aid. Fishing in the Baltic is dead in Poland.”says the forty-year-old, who runs a successful establishment with his wife – Tawerna Klipper – and has just opened five apartments for the ever-increasing number of holidaymakers visiting the Baltic coast.
“In the early 1990s, I had three employees, there was cod in abundance. There is no more, the sprats they eat are caught in mass by big boats, which transform them into animal meal [pour nourrir les saumons d’élevage] “, he explains. The profile of this coastal fisherman turned restaurateur, taking advantage of the tourists flocking to the beaches of the Baltic Sea in July and August, is no longer surprising.
“We have lost 50% of our members in ten years: we have 120 today,” confirms Jacek Wittbrodt, head of the Sea Fishermen's Association, based in Wladyslawowo. The sixty-year-old, himself a fisherman, adds that “Cod and salmon, which small coastal fishermen no longer have access to, were nevertheless the mainstay of our livelihood. We cannot live on flatfish alone.” In order to make ends meet, his organisation has also given in to the lure of holidaymakers, transforming several plots of its car park into pitches for camper vans.
“It's been catastrophic for four years”
The decline in fish stocks in the Baltic is certainly not new, but it has continued to worsen, reflecting the effects of unbridled fishing until the end of the 1980s, before fish resources began to decline. “At that time, there were so many that you could take whatever you wanted. The whole country was waiting for its fish.”recognizes Jacek Wittbrodt.
In November 2021, after multiple warnings from fishermen and scientists, and a moratorium in the second half of 2019, the Council of Ministers of the European Union finally banned commercial fishing for cod in the Baltic Sea. Like cod, salmon can only be caught incidentally. Sprat quotas have also been reduced. As for herring, another key fish for fishermen in this northern and eastern European sea, it is becoming dangerously rare while Brussels is reluctant to ban its capture outright.
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Source: Lemonde
