International

At the urging of SP Member of Parliament Hugo Polderman, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Gerda Verburg will order an enquiry into the effects on Mauritania's coast of mechanical shellfish removal. This manner of harvesting shellfish was ended in 2004 in the Netherlands' own coastal seas in the Wadden region due to the massive environmental damage it caused. The Dutch fisheries corporations involved appear, however, to have simply relocated their activities to the West African coast. “Destruction of nature should not be moved elsewhere,” says Polderman, “but ended.”

To date the only enquiry which has been conducted relating to these fisheries was into the food quality of the harvested shellfish, but the effects of the fisheries on the local economy and the natural enbvironment remain under-researched. “Activities which were banned in the Wadden Sea because of the enormous environmental damage for which they were responsible seem now to have been exported to the Mauritanian coast,” Polderman says. “The minister's undertaking gives us the possibility of demanding that this shellfish harvesting operation be subjected to a sustainability test. If we find overcropping of our own coast unacceptable, then we should not be relocating these damaging methods of shellfish harvesting but banning them. The destruction of the natural environment is as bad there as it was here.”