Sweden can eradicate the eel – to benefit 200 landowners

Published 5 October 2024 at 13.02

Domestic. Despite the fact that the eel is acutely threatened with extinction, the government opened the door last spring to maintain the commercial eel fishery, which is currently conducted by around 200 landowners. At the same time, Sweden avoids its obligation to introduce a six-month ban on commercial eel fishing – by putting the ban in the middle of winter.

Share the article

TwittraShare

Eel fishing is banned for ordinary people in Sweden since the beginning of the 2000s, but the ban does not apply to landowners in sparsely populated areas with a special permit, which they received because they have traditionally fished endangered eels.

The professional fishermen with permits are now usually older men who carry out fishing as an additional livelihood alongside forestry or other livelihoods associated with extensive land ownership, and it was thought that eel fishing would disappear in connection with these fishermen becoming too old to fish for eels . No new permits are granted.

But this spring, Ulf Kristersson's government suddenly tasked the Norwegian Sea and Water Authority with ensuring that eel fishing permits can be “inherited”.

The initiative came from sparsely populated politicians from the Center Party who proposed that new permits should be granted. According to the politicians, the presence or absence of the eel cannot be allowed to govern the Swedish regulations in the area.

“A living coast and archipelago, a promotion of small businesses and a continuation of small-scale lake fishing and coastal fishing – a living cultural heritage – are also important values”, it was said, among other things, in a parliamentary motion.

During the time when the convicted eel fisherman PM Nilsson was Ulf Kristersson's state secretary, the government worked out a method for Sweden to circumvent its obligation to introduce a six-month ban on eel fishing in the Baltic Sea, a rule that the EU has introduced, by Sweden placing the ban between the October 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024. The ban was condemned as a scam by environmental organizations.

“There is no eel fishing between January and March in Swedish waters”, stated the World Wide Fund for Nature, among other things.

WWF wanted the stop to be placed instead during July-December during the eel spawning migration, but also when the landowners want to fish mostly eels.

The statistics show that Swedish landowners intend to continue fishing for eels if they are not stopped by force. In recent years, Swedish fisheries inspectors have taken up over a thousand illegal eel catches, and in many cases it is precisely family traditions and descent from wealthy Swedish land-owning families when eel fishing is discovered.

“If you have always fished for eels, which you have in Karlskrona archipelago, have always set hooks, lures and illuminated them with a lamp at night, then eel fishing is a natural part of life itself, like fishing for perch, explained Kristersson's state secretary PM Nilsson in a post on social media in 2008, where he judged out the ban as a “distant EU ban”.

When he himself was later forced to resign after being caught for illegal eel fishing, he expressed surprise that the local authorities chose to proceed with the report despite his family ties to landowner in the locality.

“I have been fishing for eels since childhood and belong to the southern Swedish eel fishing culture”, thundered PM Nilsson in vain before he was forced to resign.