BRDO PRI KRANJU, Slovenia—France will propose changing EU state aid rules to the fisheries sector to help cushion the financial pain felt by fishermen due to spiralling fuel prices, its fisheries minister said on Tuesday.
French fishermen fighting for cheaper fuel have been blockading ports, disrupting traffic on land and sea, and have also blocked the fuel depot of France's largest oil refinery.
Backed by Italy, and possibly Spain, France is now drafting a proposal that would raise the amount of financial aid that a government may grant to its fisheries sector without attracting the robust scrutiny of internal market regulators in Brussels.
"The high diesel price is of concern to everybody in the fishing sector," France's Fisheries Minister Michel Barnier said. "We will make a proposal ... I feel a European response is necessary," he told a news conference in Slovenia.
"The current ceiling of national aid should be increased," he said, speaking after an informal meeting of European Union farm ministers. "There are various options that we are discussing -- including direct European intervention," he said.
French fishermen say they will go bust unless they obtain discounted diesel at 40 euro cents ($0.63) per litre as opposed to 80 euro cents on the market. The price of marine diesel has surged by 30 percent in the past four months.
While a pledge by the French government to grant 110 million euros in aid this year has prompted some fishermen to go back to work, others have dismissed the step as insignificant.
"We need to keep a fishing industry in Europe rather than relying on imports from other parts of the world where we can't always rely on the types of standards that we are used to," said Barnier, who is also France's minister for agriculture.
He won backing from Italy, another of the EU's major fishing nations. Diplomats said Spain might also endorse Barnier.
"This (fuel prices) is now a 100 million euros problem for Italy. We think, along with Barnier, that this is a Commission problem," Italy's Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia told reporters.
The EU has strict rules about aid doled out by its member states to particular industries and companies, designed to ensure governments grant assistance that does not give one sector in a particular country an unfair trade advantage.
In 2006, it increased the state aid exemption threshold so that fishermen in any EU country may receive up to 30,000 euros each over three years without the national government having to notify Brussels. Before, it was just 3,000 euros. When Barnier's proposal is finalised, assuming the approval of the European Commission's fisheries chief, it is likely to be presented to EU fisheries ministers at their meeting in June.
"If there is the interest, and I think there will be, then we can open the issue at the level of the European Union," Slovenia's Agriculture Minister Iztok Jarc told reporters.
Slovenia holds the six-month rotating EU presidency that chairs EU ministers' meetings until the end of next month.
But not all EU ministers will agree, it appears.
"This reality (of high oil prices) cannot be avoided by new measures that do not solve the problem. High oil prices affect everybody: farmers, fishermen, industry and ordinary people," said Jaime Silva, Portugal's Agriculture and Fisheries Minister.
"People have to adapt and improve their competitiveness. They could modernise boats and diversify. Not just catch the fish but transform fish to sell it in a different way. That is the way to improve the competitiveness of the sector—not subsidies," he said.
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