PROHIBITION OF DEEP TRAWLING, LOST… BUT WIN!

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE BLOOM ASSOCIATION

Supported by LOONGITUDE 181 NATURE

Dear friends, dear supporters,

You saw it in the press: we lost the vote of 10 December on the prohibition of deep trawling to a few voices.

But the voting list was confusing because it was first necessary to REJECT the first amendment so that it could vote against deep trawling. If this first amendment was adopted, it made the following amendments fail and even made it impossible to pronounce on the prohibition of deep trawling.

Many members were wrong and passed the amendment instead of rejecting it. Among them were some of our "champions" who had publicly defended the ban on deep trawling. As soon as they realized their mistake, they had their vote corrected.
Result?
We won 343 votes against 330!

But ... this victory can not be taken into account from a legal point of view. There is no recourse.

We will have won in the archives of Parliament ... but lost the vote.

It's an incredible situation. It shows how much every detail counts to lure the trail to a political opponent, why the preparation of voting lists is crucial, why the delay between the publication of the voting lists and the vote itself counts so much ...

But that also proves that we should have won, that we have won!

Our mobilization has had concrete results and this is only the beginning:

- One week before the vote, on December 2, CASINO announced the end of deep-sea sales in January 2014,
- The day before the vote, December 9, CARREFOUR announced a similar measure that would be implemented by June 2014,
- A few hours after the vote, Intermarché published on its Facebook page that its fleet now wanted to avoid targeting deep-sea species.

Your mobilization convinced the economic actors to act where the elected officials fail.

We will come back to you within a few days to give you concrete directions for the next steps.

Already, let's aim a million signatures to our petition to make our expectations known to the French government. Their position does not even reflect the French socialist reality because many are elected and socialist activists who support the prohibition of deep trawling.

France must repair the damage it has caused. It can negotiate with industry (especially Intermarché) the transition period to get out of deep trawling and propose a ban on this method of fishing to the Council by 3 or 4 years instead of the two years so far proposed by Europe .

The France can and must become a force of proposal to the Council European ministers.

Continue to share our petition on networks, like our FACEBOOK page, follow us on Twitter and join us by becoming a member for only 10 euros per year here: http://www.bloomassociation.org/nous-soutenir/.

See you soon for next steps

Very warmly,

BLOOM team