Two organisations representing more than 100,000 anglers in Sweden and Finland have written to the EU Commission voicing “deep concern” over the “greatly lowered” number of spawning wild salmon returning to their rivers this summer.
The letter, from the Swedish National Sport Fishing Association, the Finnish Federation for Recreational Fishing and a regional organisation of local authorities in northern Sweden, echoes earlier reports of increasing problems for salmon stocks spawning in Scandinavian rivers to produce fish in both the Baltic and the Barents Sea.
The European Anglers Alliance (EAA), an umbrella organisation, published a similar call for better salmon management in the Baltic following its General Assembly in Helsinki in August, and a resolution adopted at that meeting pointed to the worsening situation in the Tana River, a 330-kilometre border river between Norway and Finland in the north, until now famous for its excellent salmon fishery.
Noting that they had within their borders rivers that produced more than 57 percent of all commercially caught salmon in the Baltic, the organisations behind the latest letter said that returns to those rivers of wild salmon during the 2010 summer were only 50 percent of those in 2009.
The two dominating waterways, the Torne and Kalix Rivers, producing a combined 45 percent of all commercially caught salmon in the Baltic, showed a decrease of 55 and 44 percent, respectively.
The letter held forth two main reasons for the problems: An “alarming” decrease in post smolt survival, and the large increase in commercial long line mixed stock fishery. Smolt is the early life stage of salmon.
“Low returns of spawning salmon during the 2010 season have seriously inhibited regional entrepreneurs in the sport fishing tourism industry and created a large amount of negative local media”, the letter warned.
A new management plan for the Baltic salmon is well underway, and the letter requested that the latest low return figures would be taken into consideration when finalising the plan, and that the Commission would follow the advice from the STECF – the Commission’s main scientific advisory body – that “no fishing of mixed salmon stocks should be allowed until the management target has been reached for all stocks”.