The demand comes in a joint letter to Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and Fisheries Commissioner Costas Kadis, seen exclusively by POLITICO. Sixteen agriculture and environment ministers from Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Croatia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania want the cormorant added to the list of huntable species under the EU’s flagship nature law, the 1979 Birds Directive.
They are also pressing Brussels to set coordinated population targets across the bloc and to make it easier to shoot the bird outside hunting season.
Estonian Agriculture Minister Hendrik Johannes Terras, who helped coordinate the letter, argued that the EU should be as willing to control cormorants as it is to control other predators. The bloc has loosened protections on wolves in recent years, and several countries cull invasive mink and raccoon dogs to protect ground-nesting birds.
“If we are prepared to limit the number of smaller predators to protect bird species, then why shouldn’t we reduce predation pressure to protect fish?” he told POLITICO. “Nature should be viewed as a whole.”
In the May 7 letter, the ministers blame cormorants, each capable of eating half a kilo of fish a day, for hammering inland fish stocks and emptying aquaculture ponds. Industry estimates put the damage to European fisheries and aquaculture at more than €350 million a year.
In Estonia’s coastal waters, Terras said, cormorants eat about 20,000 metric tons of fish a year, almost twice the catch of the country’s coastal fishermen.