Opposition to seal ban grows within EU, where hunters alliance is optimistic rules will change

A group representing hunters in the Nordic countries says it's more optimistic than ever that the European Union will lift a longtime ban on trading seal products.

The regulation, implemented in 2009 after a highly successful campaign from animal rights groups, deprived Canadian sealers of their primary market.

"Our hope and expectation is that the ban will be reversed and that trade can be possible again," said Johan Svalby, senior advisor for international affairs at the Nordic Hunters Alliance.

Last May, the European Commission launched a formal review of the ban, called a "fitness check."

While the commission regularly reviews its regulations, "we have a sense this time that the commission is serious in its initiative to look into the consequences of the ban", Svalby said.

The review process is taking place as a growing number of EU countries bordering the Baltic Sea worry about the effect the region's steadily increasing seal population could be having on fish stocks. 

Last month, Sweden sent the commission a letter requesting the 27-member bloc loosen its rules on trading seal products, given that managing the region's seal population relies on hunters who currently have no market for their meat and pelts. 

"There has been a sharp increase in these species in the Baltic Sea, and this is endangering the recovery of certain fish stocks that are important for coastal fisheries", said Peter Kullgren, the Swedish rural affairs minister, during a meeting of European agriculture and fisheries ministers in Luxemburg on Oct. 21.

Finland, Estonia and Latvia support the Swedish proposal to manage grey and ringed seals. All four countries are concerned about the fish the predators consume in the Baltic and the damage they cause to fishing equipment.

"There's a lot of angry fishermen around here", said Jouni Heinikoski, a former hunter and fish harvester in northern Finland, earlier this year. "Because the seal population is so high nowadays, you cannot use gill nets anymore and salmon traps has to be made by special nylon."

Sven-Gunnar Lunneryd, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, said some scientists believe that fish stock recovery in the Baltic depends on culling large numbers of seals.

"We have to decrease them and somebody is going to decrease them and that's the hunters", he told CBC News in July. "It's not an easy task.… There needs to be some economic compensation to the hunters."

Svalby, with the Nordic Hunters Alliance, said that while seal quotas are much smaller in Europe than in Canada, "we fill approximately half of the quotas that we have in Sweden and Finland."

Lunneryd added that allowing a seal hunting while banning the sale of seal products goes against sustainable hunting practices.