The run-up to Christmas should be a time of brisk business and high spirits for the oyster farmers of France. In anticipation of the lavish plates that will be served up and savored in dining rooms from Paris to Perpignan, demand is soaring and orders are flooding in.
The mood among beleaguered producers in the Bay of Arcachon, however, is far from celebratory. They know that many of this year’s delicacies will have been stolen from their harvesters — and they suspect that rogue members of the profession are the culprits. Local police say some 15 tonnes to 16 tonnes of oysters have been stolen this year from under the noses of the farmers in the bassin — a threefold increase on last year.
The sharp increase in thefts, a familiar problem in the world’s fourth-largest oyster producer, is blamed on the herpes-like virus that has blighted the shellfish for the past two years. The rarer the product, insiders said, the more tempting was its theft.
What makes the trend particularly unpleasant for the farmers in the Bay of Arcachon, France’s leading oyster-farming area on the southwestern Atlantic coast, is that they do not believe that outsiders are responsible for the rustling. Instead they point the finger at some of their colleagues.
“As there has been a high rate of mortality, the producers are lacking shells. And as businesses have been more than affected in recent years, some of them no longer hesitate to replenish their stocks by helping themselves to their neighbors’,” Arcachon oyster farmers president Olivier Laban said.
As a result, festive cheer is in short supply in the bay, a crucial location for France’s 1 billion euro (US$1.49 billion) per year industry.
“It’s a big disappointment and I’m almost ashamed to say it,” Laban told La Depeche. “It’s awful because it creates a kind of suspicion and a bad atmosphere among us. If it goes on, soon we’ll be hiding our oyster sacks like you hide gold bars.”
Vincent Eyquem, a farmer from the village of Gujan-Mestras who fell victim to the thieves last month, agreed.
“Next year we’re going to have to have a padlock on each sack,” he said, adding that two tonnes of oysters that he had packed and were ready for delivery “vanished” overnight.
He estimates the loss at 8,500 euros — a high price to pay in an industry already struggling to cope with the effects of the OsHV-1 virus, which is believed to have killed billions of young oysters in French waters since last year.
A spokesman for the Arcachon nautical police brigade, whose job it is to patrol the coastline and keep a watch out for unusual activity in the oyster farms, agreed that most of the time the thefts were carried out by professionals.
“You can’t be an amateur sailor. To steal oysters in those quantities you’ve got to have a proper boat,” he said.
He emphasized the difficulty in catching the culprits.
“We know that they go out either well before low tide or well after low tide,” he said. “But it’s very hard to know which boat, at which location, at which time.”
To combat the rise in thefts, police have stepped up their presence at sea this season and have increased their helicopter surveillance of the area. They are also trying to carry out checks on any boats returning to shore unusually late at night.
Laban and other farmers, however, are pushing for more effective action to discourage the thieves, including harsher penalties for those caught.
They say they would like to see those found guilty “thrown out of the profession for life.”
At the moment those found guilty are subject to a fine; a prison sentence is only applicable to re-offenders. Three oyster farmers, successfully prosecuted by police at the beginning of this year, are still working in the bassin having paid their fines, much to the annoyance of other producers.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS