May 9, 2016 — Maine lobster suppliers met behind closed doors with dealers from some of Europe’s biggest lobster importing countries in Brussels last week to discuss a pending ban on importing live North American lobsters into Europe.
The six Maine companies joined their Massachusetts and Canadian peers, as well as national trade officials, to discuss the proposed ban with buyers and trade officials from eight European countries, including the three biggest importers of Homarus americanus: France, Italy and Spain. The meeting occurred at the world’s largest seafood industry trade show, said spokesman Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, an American seafood industry trade group.
About 75 people met for 90 minutes to talk about how to avoid the all-out ban that Sweden asked the European Union to adopt in March after finding North American lobsters in European waters.
“Brussels was productive,” Gibbons said. “Unnecessarily excluding live North American lobsters from that market would have real impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, sales and jobs. So, no one is taking this lightly.”
In March, Sweden petitioned the European Union to declare the North American lobster an invasive species, which would ban live imports to the EU’s 28 member states. It based its petition on an 85-page risk assessment that claims the discovery of a small number of North American lobsters in the waters off Great Britain, Norway and Sweden over the last 30 years, including one female lobster carrying hybrid eggs, proved cross-breeding had taken place. The Swedish scientists say a ban would protect the European lobster from cross-breeding and diseases carried by the North American lobster.