“To deal with the blue crab emergency, we need the appointment of an extraordinary commissioner to start intensive capture campaigns, encouraging fishermen, restoring lagoon habitats in the Po delta and restarting farming activities with a sowing campaign”. This is the request made by the president of Coldiretti Ettore Prandini in a letter to the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida. “Despite the important interventions undertaken by the ministry – we read in the letter – the situation continues to cause strong concern and unease among operators in the sector”.
A situation that worries over 2,000 shellfish farmers and fishermen in the Po Delta alone, with a large part of the employees of cooperatives and consortia finding themselves on redundancy pay and with difficulty for the employees of individual businesses who cannot benefit from it. “The impact – says Coldiretti Impresa Pesca – is only found in the Northern Adriatic, affecting the regions of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, the central and southern Adriatic are currently only touched by the problem. The areas of fish production most damaged, with production reduced by up to 80%, are those of the lagoons, pockets and coastal strip where there are the largest farms of bivalve molluscs (clams and mussels) in Europe”.
The ministry, as stated in the letter sent by President Prandini, “has already allocated 2.9 million euros first for the capture and disposal of the blue crab and subsequently 10 million for the purchase of seed and protection of farms, resources useful but not conclusive”, calculating that the damage, as Coldiretti Impresa Pesca underlines, “is hypothesized to be around 200 million, but the assessment is not yet definitive given that the phenomenon is still ongoing”.
