By Michel Rose
SETE, France
Thu Jan 28, 2010 6:49am EST SETE, France (Reuters) – As the clock on Sete’s city tower strikes 5 p.m., the clear blue sky of this Mediterranean seaport suddenly fills with seagulls, awaiting the return of fishing boats from their regulated time at sea. SETE, France (Reuters) – As the clock on Sete’s city tower strikes 5 p.m., the clear blue sky of this Mediterranean seaport suddenly fills with seagulls, awaiting the return of fishing boats from their regulated time at sea. “They will be disappointed today. Mackerel and sardines are just not there,” says a fish trader at the Pecherie Cettoise, next to the Sete wholesale fish market. “It’s the tuna, they eat the other fish and there are too many of them.” … “We are talking about a very small number of individuals who became extremely rich, who are now euro millionaires,” says Francois Catzeflis, a biologist at Montpellier-II University and a member of Greenpeace. “As soon as military sonar equipment was available for civil use, they would buy it,” he adds. … The World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) said recently that tuna could become extinct as soon as 2012 because of the size of the Mediterranean fleet and estimates of undeclared fishing. Scientists struggle to work out how big bluefin stocks are. … About 1,500 jobs are at stake in Sete and the golden age of the “sushi boom” is already coming to an end. “Before, we would work between three and six months a year and make about 30,000 euros,” said Akabbar Im’hand, a fisherman in Sete for 32 years. “Now, with a 50-tone quota (per boat) you earn up to 5,000 euros. You can’t live a whole year on that.” (Reporting by Michel Rose, editing by Tim Pearce)
French fishermen fear end of sushi bonanza
