During our foray into the world of Seaweed trawling we’ve had a number of contacts with FMC – both personally through a chat with Ole Damm Kvilhaug who is responsible for FMCs operations here in Norway and second hand through actions my little group has undertaken.

Its almost like fencing – you work at your opponent hoping they will show a weakness.

For a while we concentrated on illegal trawling – we got one prosecution through but any more were heavily thwarted – so we tried overloaded ships – we filmed the trawlers overloaded and went to the Norwegian maritime authorities – yes they said, they do appear overloaded.  We were given to believe that there had been an immediate prosecution – the ships were suddenly much less loaded – but that only lasted a little while.

So we filmed the ships again – we were told by the Sjøfartsdirektoratet that they had a visit from FMC and that the quality of our videos were now too poor to pick out any details.  As i said fencing.

It brings to mind Monsanto cheerily causing devastation through court rulings against farmers and others – little realizing that it was kicking up a storm of massive proportions – one that is costing them dear.

With all this in mind there is a document produced by the eu on seaweed harvesting problems – essentially I think it says – if you want to start commercial seaweed harvesting and come across any environmental or local governmental problems we will have a team ready that can ease any problems.  This is the document –

PROBLEMATIC

Here are some snips

Front page

and

I have spoken to a number of colleagues about this and it seems to be a major ramping up of mechanical seaweed harvesting everywhere – roll on – the sooner the damage is visible the sooner it will be stopped. NEVER?

We’ll find out!

We sent Net Algae a question on their question form –

I hope to be able to post their answer soon.

fAs many of you are no doubt aware seaweed trawling on the Norwegian coast is an ecological disaster – scientific papers show this, articles in the press clearly show this.

Information is carefully managed with  misinformation and public officials happy to mislead the public.

This is a severe breach of the Norwegian constitution Grunnlæven 112 –  110b

Every Norwegian citizen has a right to a clean and sustainable environment – seaweed trawling destroys the animals in the forests and the plants – tearing up the plants redistributes sediments containing pollutants which are then passed up the food chain to humans – some of those pollutants cause infertility among other problems, many are cancer causing.

Norwegian version

We would like the state in the person of the Prime minister Erna Solberg to know how disturbed we are by this industry

This letter is meant to be downloaded and printed – the letter is not for email.

At the top of the letter is the address for postage – please do not alter the text but add your own under comments if need be.

There are two versions – in English and Norwegian hopefully there will soon be many more in other languages, this is worldwide
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ENGLISH TEXT