Text tabled : A6-0253/2009

  Carl Lang and Fernand Le Rachinel (NI), in writing. – (FR) In 2008, 165 trawlers were scrapped. In 2009, it has already been announced that 225 will go.

The fisheries sector in France is suffering greatly because the French Government and Brussels have decided to sacrifice French fishermen for the sake of European economic and trade policy.

Thus, Norway, a country outside the European Union, but which has negotiated gas-related economic agreements with the latter, awards itself alone 80% of the cod quota, a figure amounting to 500 000 tonnes per year. France, for its part, has access to only 9 000 tonnes per year, of which only 700 tonnes come from the English Channel and the North Sea.

How, under these circumstances, can one fail to feel disgust at witnessing the eradication of French fishermen? Why are Brussels and the French Government thus striving to plot the destruction of an entire sector of our economy? Euro-globalist interests and the dogma of free trade are why.

It is not the EUR 4 million envelope promised by the minister for agriculture and fisheries, intended as financial compensation linked to the stopping of boats that have reached their quota of fish, that will solve this problem. There is an urgent, crucial need to free French fishermen from these discriminating and destructive European quotas.