Emmanuel Macron’s web of lies to journalists

10 June 2025

On Monday 9th June, at the end of the first day of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans (UNOC), French President Emmanuel Macron held a press conference that left us stunned. Through  nasty quips, untruths, contempt for the facts and his refusal to acknowledge the very existence of an industrial fishing fleet in France, we had a peek into the president’s alternative reality. 

It should alarm each and every one of us that the man who presides over the country’s destiny lives in an alternative reality where large-scale industrial fishing, which represents less than 4% of the French fleet and half of French catches, which monopolizes half of public diesel subsidies and which controls the National Fisheries Committee, does not exist. 

Worse still, the president displayed absolute contempt for the conclusions of scientists and the international recommendations that require us to ban, without further delay, destructive fishing techniques such as trawling in areas designated for ecosystem conservation. He even asserted while looking journalists, who wanted to understand why his announcements over the last few days had made BLOOM distraught, square in the eye that “we love to flagellate ourselves”, and that “we’re actually very good students”. 

An anthology of the press conference reads like a requiem for nature. 

The President of the Republic lives in an alternative reality, and remains impervious to all criticism and questioning. It doesn’t matter that scientists have written for years warning of “the growing mistrust of political power in the scientific community”. It doesn’t matter that we’ve warned against misleading announcements that clear the way for industrial fishing, to the detriment of the ocean, the climate and the future of French fishermen. “I’m convinced of the path we’ve taken”, concluded Emmanuel Macron in response to a journalist who noted the discrepancy between the Elysée’s assurance that the conference would be “a success”, and the NGOs and scientists predicting a major diplomatic disaster. 

To hell with long-term scientific studies warning of unfair competition between small-scale and industrial fishing. To hell with the studies by economists and sociologists describing a sector based on an inequitable model of quota and subsidy allocation. To hell with the distress calls from small coastal fishermen on the verge of bankruptcy after the waters of the English Channel have been emptied by an onslaught of trawlers and destructive vessels. To hell with the investigations of journalists and the films of the greatest documentary filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

To all these, the President retorts, against all evidence, that fishermen form a united and homogeneous block. To all these, the President explains that French industrial fishing does not exist. To all these, the President replies: “For the last eight years, I’ve had a fairly simple method: I never take action against fishermen”.  

Everyone here will understand that the President means he will never take action against trawlers. Even if it means the ruin of the entire small-scale coastal fishing industry. In the face of such wilful ignorance, hope is in vain. 

The UNOC will be a diplomatic shipwreck, where young people’s hopes for a living ocean, a stable climate and a fair economic transition will be dead and buried. 

Emmanuel Macron’s alternative reality 

“We have a large boat that does processing, the Émeraude, and I’m not mistaken in mentioning it. It’s the only big boat in the French fleet that really cuts and processes. But we don’t have an industrial fleet, and we respect fishing rules perfectly.“

Benefiting from a tailor-made public policy, vessels over 25 meters represent less than 4% of the French fleet, capture half of all catches, and account for half of the entire sector’s diesel tax rebates. These 25 meters or longer vessels engage in a variety of activities: 

• Bottom trawling, including some of France’s largest vessels, such as the Emeraude (81m), owned by Euronor and Compagnie des pêches St Malo; 

• Pelagic trawling, such as the Scombrus (81m) and Prins Bernhard (88m) belonging to France Pélagique; 

• Purse seining, notably practiced by the Compagnie Française de Thon Océanique tropical tuna boats, whose average length exceeds 80m. These vessels, numbering around twenty, capture around 20% of France’s annual catch. 

The companies mentioned are all Dutch-owned, as we revealed in our Big Five report. Journalist Charles Villa also investigated the code of silence surrounding the power of this industry in his documentary, viewed nearly a million times. In 2024, investigative reporter Jean-Pierre Canet looked into the sham of French marine protected areas left at the mercy of large-scale industrial fishing. BLOOM also investigated in the field, turning the spotlight on factory ships over 100 meters long, such as the Zeeland, fishing in the Bancs des Flandres, a marine protected area near Dunkirk. 

The president’s disregard for international recommendations 

“But today, France respects its international commitments with regard to its exclusive economic zones. We are over the 30% protection threshold and over the 10% strong protection threshold (…) So France is one of the best students. There are no better pupils than us in Europe today, given our zone“. 

France is in no way complying with international and European scientific recommendations and objectives. The European Union has set itself the target of protecting 30% of its waters, a third of which should be under strict protection. According to the IUCN, marine protected areas must exclude all destructive fishing techniques such as trawling, as well as all industrial activities and infrastructures. 

The French government boasts that 33% of its marine areas are “protected”. But in mainland France, less than 0.1% of our waters are actually protected according to international scientific criteria. France has the most trawled marine “protected” area in Europe, the Bay of Biscay slope. In 2024, over 300,000 hours of trawling took place in our “protected” areas, representing 40% of trawling hours in France, in areas that should be sanctuaries for biodiversity and small-scale fishing. And since January 1, 2025, 43,400 km2 of seabed have been destroyed by bottom trawlers in the supposedly “protected” marine areas of mainland France. 

In contrast, other European countries are implementing a genuine protection policy, following the example of the UK, which has already banned bottom trawling and fishing techniques that scrape the seabed in a quarter of its marine protected areas, and which has just announced to the UNOC a ban on bottom trawling in 30,000 km2 of marine protected areas, thus protecting half of England’s marine protected areas from this destructive fishing technique. 

But France is not only failing to act, it is using its diplomatic power to destroy any European and international ambitions for marine protection. Back in 2022, France torpedoed the COP15 international negotiations by ensuring that the EU’s negotiating mandate did not mention the 10% “strict protection” target, nor that destructive fishing techniques should be banned in all protected areas. As the icing on the cake, when the UK announced a ban on bottom trawling in certain zones of its protected areas, the French government threatened the British with “retaliatory measures”, before pushing the European Commission to initiate international arbitration proceedings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to force our neighbors across the Channel to reverse the progress made protecting the marine environment. 

Furthering its role as a disruptive power, France succeeded in destroying the ambitions set out in the “European Ocean Action Plan” of February 2023 by pushing the European Commission to adopt the notion of “protection on a case-by-case basis” in the “European Oceans Pact” published by the Commission ahead of UNOC. 

Far from international objectives, the politics of numbers 

 ”Finally, I’d like to point out that France has made commitments for its own marine protected areas. The decisions taken by Polynesia put us well above this figure, and we are therefore one of the most protective countries in terms of marine protected areas.  (…) We are now also strongly protected, at 14%; the target is 10%.” 

At the UNOC, France boasted that “strong protection” in its waters has gone from 4% to 14%. In so doing, it is appropriating the fruit of the dedicated work carried out in Polynesia for over ten years by the Polynesian government, local players, the Pew Bertarelli initiative, the French Biodiversity Office and others. 

By claiming Polynesia’s announcement as his own, Emmanuel Macron wanted to turn the spotlight on France’s overseas territories to divert attention from the waters of mainland France, where less than 0.1% of our waters are effectively protected. 

However, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is categorical: “To preserve biodiversity, it is important to extend and effectively manage the current network of protected areas (…) This implies planning ecologically representative networks of interconnected protected areas to cover key areas for biodiversity”. A goal also set by the European Union in 2020 in its Biodiversity Strategy 2030: “efforts must be made at a global level, and the Union itself must do more and better for nature and establish a truly coherent trans-European nature network”. 

The challenge is therefore not simply to exceed the targets of 30% protected areas and 10% strict protection thanks to the overseas territories, but to achieve 30% protected areas, one third of which are under strict protection, along each coastline and each sea basin. 

At the opening of the UNOC, the Secretary General of the United Nations recalled that the objective set in Montreal at COP15 was to preserve 30% of coastal zones by 2030. With this in mind, many scientists are talking about the possibility of creating an interconnected network of small marine protected areas to protect biodiversity in all its diversity and forms.