The catch for Dutch fishermen

The government decided that,beginning this year,fishing for eels will be banned from September to November. “It’s a good start,though we think it will be several years before the species is recovered,” said Clarisse Buma,spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands. “In all stages of life,” she said,“the European eel is threatened.”

But time is running out for the eel fishermen too. So Visser,chairman of the Federation of Dutch Inland Fishermen,is negotiating an alternative with the government. When Visser’s father fished a generation ago,about 200 fishermen plied the canals and rivers of his native Friesland,in the Dutch north; now there are 17. “It is not a happy situation,” he said.

Aart van der Waal is certainly unhappy. A burly,tattooed man who occasionally quotes George Orwell and whose cell phone rings with Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones,he lives with his wife and four children in a brick cottage outside this village along Hollands Diep,an estuary that flows to the sea. Van der Waal,40,the son of an insurance broker,has fished for eels since his teens,interrupting his fishing for about a year to study law,after which he returned to eels. Neither of his sons shows an interest in his job. “They see their father’s cold hands and the troubles with the government,” he said,shaking his head. He fishes the delta of the Rhine and Meuse rivers,where a century ago 100 eel fishermen dragged their nets; today there are four.

The eels commonly fished here spend most of their lives in fresh water,like the Dutch rivers and estuaries; adult eels migrate annually to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean to breed,after which young eels,known as glass eels,return to Europe. But the number of glass eels entering the rivers has dropped to about 1 per cent of former levels,according to the World Wildlife Fund.

While the government has appropriated $960,000 for fishing businesses to compensate for the loss,van der Waal is dismissive. “We get money from the government,but it’s half of what we earn,” he said.

Given the eel’s endangered state,some Dutch fisheries have begun farming eels,while supermarket chains have stopped stocking it. Food companies have begun replacing it. In Spain,where glass eels are fished for export to Asia,faux eel meat is made of Alaskan pollock; in the Netherlands,one big food wholesaler,Anova Seafood,has developed a new fish,a cross of two types of African catfish that it calls the Claresse,an invented name it has trademarked,that it sells as a substitute for eel,both smoked and fresh. The Claresse,said Hendrik Colpaert,Anova’s marketing director,“is positioned as eel,though not in presentation or flavour; the reaction from retailers has been very favourable.”

Visser hopes to forge a three-way alliance among eel fishermen,eel farmers and traders to negotiate an alternate plan with the government that would restore the wild eel population without a lengthy ban on fishing. Something had to be done to fix the declining eel population,he agreed,yet oddly,despite the scarcity,the price of eel was not increasing. “The funny thing is,they’re selling now for less than four to five years ago,” he said.