More than seven years on from the initial court appearance to challenge the allocation by the French authorities of quotas for bluefin tuna, a group of organisations representing small-scale fisheries has seen upheld a ruling to annul a ministerial order setting out the arrangements for allocating the bluefin tuna quota granted to France for 2017.
Main image: Sathoan
Syndicat des Petits Métiers d’Occitanie, the Plateforme de la petite pêche artisanale, the Low Impact Fishers of Europe (LIFE), the Comité départemental des pêches du VAR and the Prud’homie des pêcheurs de la Ciotat (Bouches du Rhône) has welcomed the decision by the Administrative Court of Appeal (ACA) in Toulouse to uphold the annulment of a ministerial order setting out the arrangements for allocating the bluefin tuna quota granted to France for 2017.
After an initial ruling in its favour in June 2021, followed by the appeal lodged by the State in September 2021, this result raises the hopes of many small-scale fishers who face an challenging situation in terms of the distribution of fishing quotas that are seen as being disproportionately allocated to the large-scale sector of the fleet.
The ACA simply confirmed the Montpellier Court’s 2021 ruling: Article L. 921-2 of the French Rural and Maritime Fishing Code lacks a legal basis. It governs the allocation of fishing opportunities based on three criteria, namely producers’ track record, market trends and economic balance, ignoring the integration of the environmental criterion into national texts required by European regulations and specifically art. 17 of the Common Fisheries Policy, which states that Member States shall use transparent and objective criteria, including environmental, social and economic criteria.
According to LIFE Platform, the case of bluefin tuna is particularly symbolic of this unfair situation, with a French national quota of nearly 7000 tonnes almost entirely redistributed to large-scale Mediterranean operators for export.
‘The bluefin tuna stock has been recovering over the past ten years, and we can only congratulate ourselves on its good state today. This positive trend has led to an increase in the French quota from 3226 tonnes in 2017 to 6693 tonnes in 2024. However, its internal distribution is still very unbalanced between industrial and small-scale fisheries in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic,’ a LIFE Platform representative commented.
‘The group hopes that this legal breakthrough regarding access to resources will have a tangible impact on the ground for the hundreds of fishers fighting for survival.’
