SOS from Galician seafood: cockles and clams die and the threat comes from the sky

Seafood is the king of the Christmas table and Galicia is the nursery of Spain. The bivalve is in danger, especially the clam (slug, blonde, fine, japonica) and the cockle, with a productive drop of 76% in 2023 compared to the average of the previous decade. It has been a crazy autumn for the 3,614 people who have a permit (permex) for shellfishing on foot in the region, distributed between Pontevedra (2,050), A Coruña (1,528) and Lugo (36). The majority are veteran women waiting to retire who have found in the sand a way to earn a living and support their families' finances, as their ancestors did, searching for bread in the sand..

“We go into the tide with fear, because we don't know what we are going to find and if it will be good or enough,” a veteran shellfish harvester, with many decades of raking under her belt, explains to El Confidencial..

First, a very long train of chained storms prevented them from fishing for a month, in which intense rains, hurricane winds and spring tides formed the perfect storm.. When it finally cleared, at the beginning of November, they came across tons of shells piled up on the banks.. Dead or dying shellfish, now useless. The rains, so longed for to fill reservoirs, had as collateral victims the most popular mollusks of the Galician estuaries.. Because? The Tambre, Traba and Lérez rivers drained with such force into the delicate ecosystem of the estuaries that the salinity dropped suddenly and the seafood died..

This is what happened in Noia and Rianxo, 40 kilometers southwest of Santiago, where they spent several days shoveling kilos and kilos of shells that the waves unearthed and pushed to the shore to return them to the sea in a titanic effort to try to recover them for the future.. Also in Carril or A Illa, already in the Arousa estuary, similar scenes were experienced. Some major bosses pointed to an economic desire in the sudden opening of the dams to move the turbines of the hydroelectric concessionaires that led to a torrent of water.

From November 15 to 27, they closed those estuaries to shellfish fishing in the hope that they would recover and be able to save the Christmas campaign, the most important of the year in terms of demand and price.. On Monday the 27th, the shellfish harvesters at the bottom of the Pontevedra estuary returned to the sand with relative relief, although it was difficult to reach the (low) catch limit of six kilos per person (five of japonica clam and one of fine clam).. “It's not going to be a good campaign, but we hope it becomes regular,” explained Elena Padín, its senior employer..

“Almost two months without going out to sea and today it was difficult to get the quota,” explains César Rodríguez, from the San Telmo brotherhood.. The Provincial Federation of Brotherhoods of Pontevedra, the most powerful and numerous, openly defends the declaration of a catastrophic area. “It is an exceptional situation for which we need exceptional measures,” claims Manuel Rosas, the president, who does not remember anything similar in two decades.. “Mortality is very high and affected not only the adult size but also the offspring.”. “The chain is broken,” laments Rosas..

The Galician brotherhoods demand that the Xunta raise their request to the central government to open the door to economic compensation. The Xunta does not put figures on the mortality reported by the brotherhoods because they are “estimates”, waiting to collect the exact data in the affected estuaries before substantiating this emergency declaration.. Meanwhile, María Porto, president of the shellfish harvesters at the foot of Carril (Arousa), denounced again this week that the mortality already affects all species and demands that the Xunta intervene immediately because people “are going to work land”, desperate for the wasteland that the estuary has become. In 2001, there were 6,551 shellfishers with permex. Today it resists half.

A single shellfish harvester under 20 years of age

More than 2,000 families live by fishing shellfish on foot in the province of Pontevedra, 62% are women; 768 shellfish harvesters are over 51 years old and 258 are over 60, according to data from the Fishing Platform from the last year. The same pattern is repeated in A Coruña, with 1,528 legal permits. In the entire community there is only one person under the age of 20 with permission to seafood in new areas where Gallegian rivers are distributed with several cofradías in each: Arousa (7), Vigo, Pontevedra (3), Muros, Fisterra, Costa da Morte, A Coruña-Ferrol (4), Cedeira and A Mariña. To the group we must add dozens of poachers who have historically despoiled the coasts on foot, afloat or diving with a bottle to hunt crab, catch scallops or scratch barnacles from the rocks..

But the enemy of seafood is not rain. Pollution, climate change, irregular dredging, poaching or the proliferation of prohibited practices such as octopus fishing with bleach have done a lot of damage to an ecosystem as unique as it is delicate, between sweet and salty..

“A decade ago, from the slimy clam bank of As Pías (Ferrol) we took 1,000 kilos. Now there are eight and where before there were 300 families, now there is not even enough for 20,” Isabel Maroño, former patron saint of the Ferrol brotherhood, tells El Confidencial.. What happens in Ferrol has its replica to the south. In 2000, 800 tons of slimy clams; In 2021, there were 158,000 kilos, explains Xaquín Rubido, spokesperson for the Platform in Defense of the Ría de Arousa (PDRA), which brings together its seven brotherhoods and mussel producers..

They are especially concerned about the drop in cockle production, which is around 76%, or 74% of the slimy clam, which they extend to all of Galicia.. “It is a progressive debacle in the face of a Xunta that neither assumes its powers nor takes measures,” the platform denounced this Tuesday.. From the Administration, they respond that they are working to replant the shellfish beds with the species most resistant to low salinity..