The U.S. and Canadian lobster industries are teaming up against Sweden in an effort to protect the future of lobster exports to all of the European Union.
The Scandinavian country is raising concerns about threats posed to native lobster species.
Back in December, Sweden reported that more than 30 North American lobsters had been harvested from its waters since 2008 — and had likely had been imported by local consumers, stored in the sea and then escaped.
That conclusion was bolstered because, as Sweden’s environment minister told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, some of the American lobsters “were still wearing rubber bands round their claws with the exporting company name on the rubber band.”
Swedish officials did not immediately return requests for comment. But in published reports overseas, Sweden says the American species pose the threat of interbreeding with local lobsters, infecting them with exotic diseases and even wiping them out.
Sweden petitioned the EU to classify certain species of American lobster as a “foreign species” and ban them from import into all 28 EU nations.
Although the ban would not affect frozen products, that still could cost American and Canadian exporters an estimated $140 million annually, and despite years of sometimes tense competition, the two countries are banding together to fight the Swedish proposal.
“We do have a strategy in place and were working on it now. We’re treating this as a top priority,” says Annie Tselikis, executive director of the Scarborough-based Maine Lobster Dealers Association, whose members sold some $10 million worth of lobster to the EU last year. “One of the biggest priorities within this working group is working with our European colleagues to try to understand the Swedish concerns and to try to establish how 32 lobsters over an eight-year period constitutes an invasive species, because this figure hardly constitutes an invasion.”
Invasion or not, Bob Bayer of the Maine Lobster Institute, who has studied the species for decades, says Europeans don’t need to worry about bacterial shell disease, for instance, which he says is very difficult to transfer from one lobster to another.
“This is pretty definitive,” he says. “The other diseases they talk about are gaffkemia, or red-tail disease, which used to be a problem in Maine we haven’t seen it for at least 10 years. It’s gone. The other issue they talk about is white spot disease, which is a virus in shrimp, and I am not aware that lobsters have ever carried it or gotten it. And that’s pretty much it.”
Tselikis says if Sweden has a problem with escaped American lobsters, the country should enforce laws against releasing them into local waters. And some political observers suspect that the concern about invasive species is really a cloak for protectionist trade policy.
“It just appears that this is somewhat ridiculous,” says U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine’s 1st District, who says the U.S. will push back. “I think it’s an appropriate time to be raising questions like this when the EU is very anxious to negotiate a trade agreement with the United States. And this doesn’t make it seem like they are playing fair with how they are treating the United States.”
Pingree says she is writing letters to Secretary of State John Kerry and to the EU Trade Commission arguing against the proposed ban.