Cull seals and cormorants to save our fish, urge Baltic coastal states

It’s a classic tale of man versus beast, only instead of the great white shark, it’s seals and cormorants that are keeping ministers in European Union countries on the Baltic Sea awake at night.

The countries, backed by a number of others, have united in a push to relax EU rules limiting the shooting of seals and cormorants, arguing that these predators threaten their fish stocks and, by extension, coastal communities.

Seals and cormorants are simply eating too many fish, which is preventing some fish stocks from recovering and being managed sustainably, Swedish Agriculture Minister Peter Kullgren told a meeting of agriculture and fisheries ministers in Luxembourg on Monday.

“Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen a huge increase in their numbers in the Baltic Sea … and this, of course, is hindering the recovery of some of our fish stocks,” Kullgren said, adding that “we’ve seen two to three times more losses when it comes to landings.”

Finland’s Agriculture Minister Sari Essayah doubled down, saying that cormorants are also a threat to aquaculture — a point echoed by Austria — and called on the European Commission to review EU laws to allow “population control.”

Czech counterpart Zdeněk Nekula added that damages from cormorants amount to about €9 million in his country. “This significantly undermines the competitiveness of producers as well as biodiversity in free waters,” the minister said.

Population explosion

The EU fishing industry also warned that seals and cormorants are a threat to the bloc’s food security.

“The exploding seal and cormorant populations are clearly breaking the natural ecosystem balance and posing a severe threat to the continuation of fishing livelihoods,” a spokesperson for industry association Europêche said.

“In Baltic coastal areas, seals and cormorants consume as much fish as is caught by fishing” and “in the context of food sovereignty, a fish preyed upon by cormorants is not available for human consumption and has to be imported,” they added.

The push is part of a bigger trend in the EU to reassess the protection level of large predators, like wolves and bears. Last month, EU countries agreed to a Commission proposal to downgrade the protection of wolves and make it easier to grant permits to shoot animals that are threatening farmers’ livestock.

Sweden and Finland have been among the member countries pushing hard for the wolf protection status to be changed. Now, Scandinavian countries are taking their fight with large predators to the sea.

Environmental groups dispute that seals and cormorants are a threat to fish stocks.

“The proposal to cull cormorants to protect fish stocks is tired, not based on any solid science, and a distraction from the real issue,” said Anouk Puymartin, a policy manager at the NGO BirdLife Europe.

“The real threat to Baltic Sea fish stocks comes from human-driven factors like overfishing, pollution, and climate change. Scientific evidence shows that culling cormorants doesn’t solve the problem,” she added.

The Commission said on Monday it had no plans to relax EU rules protecting cormorants, but did not rule out doing so for seals, depending on the results of an ongoing review expected to be completed by January.

The EU executive also suggested that countries should clean up their own act before blaming wildlife for the poor performance of their fishing industry.

The Baltic Sea is the most polluted in Europe and outgoing Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski told the ministers that its deplorable environmental state was the main reason for the decline in fish stocks.

“Lack of oxygen, increasing water pollution, eutrophication … and limited connection to the North Sea are all pressures that need to be addressed first,” he said.