‘Green Tides’ Drive Away Brittany Tourists
Brittany’s ‘Green Tides’ Kill Wild Boars
Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images
A dead wild boar lies in a cove in the bay of Saint-Brieuc in the Morieux commune.
A dead wild boar lies in a cove in the bay of Saint-Brieuc in the Morieux commune. Photographer: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images
The Chateau du Val hotel off France’s Brittany coast should be full this time of year. Instead, barely half of its 52 rooms and 28 rental properties are occupied.
Tourists are staying away after French newspapers and television stations splashed photos of the nearby beach covered in rotting seaweed, fumes from which are blamed for the deaths of 36 wild boars in July.
“This affair is going to cost us a fortune,” said Joseph Herve, the 79-year-old owner of the three-star property just outside Morieux, on Brittany’s northern coast. “The economy was already difficult enough and now we have this. Overnight, almost all my German clients canceled.”
Beaches covered in the green algae are becoming an annual occurrence in Brittany, France’s westernmost region. The issue pits the region’s 3.6 billion-euro ($5.1 billion) tourism industry against its 8.2 billion-euro farming sector, whose large quantities of animal waste and use of fertilizers are blamed by scientists for feeding the so-called green tides that form in Brittany’s shallow bays.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Finistere region of Brittany on July 7, and said “it would be absurd to solely blame farmers, who have made enormous efforts.” He called the accusations “environmental fundamentalism.”
The algae infestation became a national issue in 2009 when a horse died and its owner fell unconscious after breathing fumes at a beach about 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Morieux. The wild boar deaths have once again drawn attention to the problem.
Media Blamed
The first tests on six wild boars found July 24 showed that five had hydrogen sulphide gas in their lungs. The sixth didn’t, preventing the testers from concluding they’d been killed from breathing fumes from rotting seaweed. Test results on the remaining boars haven’t been released yet.
The region’s farmers and tourism professionals are angered by what they say are media reports exaggerating the problem.
“It’s a complex issue, and to have televisions stations showing archive images and jumping to conclusions about what killed the boars has created a real mess,” said Jean-Pierre Briens, the mayor of Morieux, standing in front of a fence blocking access to the town’s beach. At low tide the beach was mostly clear of algae, partly because it’s cleared every day.
The Sun, England’s most-read newspaper, published an article on July 28 warning British travelers about the risks of Brittany’s beaches. Philippe Pignard, who owns a hotel with a panoramic view of the beach where the horse died, says he now chases television crews away.
Tourist Cancelations
Tourist cancelations have so far been limited to affected areas, said Michael Dodds, head of the Brittany Tourist Board.
“We have 541 beaches in Brittany and one is closed,” Dodds said. “We could have been facing a catastrophe, but so far we’ve seen few effects. Most of Brittany isn’t affected.”
One reason more beaches aren’t closed is that after the much-publicized 2009 death of the horse, local governments increased seaweed collection. At low tide, tractors scoop up the Ulva Armoricana, better known as sea lettuce, which is taken to an incinerator at Launay-Lantic where it’s turned into compost.
The amount of seaweed collected rose to 61,000 metric cubes in 2010, at a cost of 850,000 euros, from 27,000 cubic meters and 345,000 euros in 2007, according to a May report for the Brittany regional government. So far this year, 32,000 metric cubes have been collected.
Seaweed is safe, if unappealing to swimmers, when fresh. It’s after it rots in the sun that gases such as hydrogen sulphide and ammonia form under the crust.
Agricultural Model
The first green tides appeared in early 1970s, growing larger in the 1980s and 1990s.
Scientists are “in unanimous agreement on the role of nitrates as the only nutritive element controlling the proliferation of green algae in Brittany,” said the report from the regional government. “The nitrates present in Breton basins arrive mostly as runoff from agricultural land.”
Similar conclusions have been reached by scientists in other afflicted areas such as the Adriatic coast of northern Italy and Qingdao region in China.
Brittany produces half of France’s pigs, about 35 percent of its chickens, and about 20 percent of its milk. Its farm and food output, about 10 percent of its economy, puts Brittany at the top of France’s 22 regions, the local government says.
“The whole model of Breton agriculture is in question,” said Jean-Paul Guyomac’h, a former university professor and member of the regional council who works with environmental group Eau et Rivieres, or Water and Rivers. “There’s no way to manage all this excrement in one small region. There are too many animals for the ground to absorb.”
Lasting Solution
The tourism industry, meanwhile lures 9 million visitors, 700,000 of whom come from Britain, Dodds estimates.
“We are paying the price of 30 years of intensive agriculture,” Dodds said. “It’s hard to change something that was encouraged by the state, and that helped turn what was a poor region into an agricultural powerhouse.”
Danielle Even, a spokesman for the CAP Bretagne farmers’ association, said pig farmers are increasingly treating slurry on site, and grain growers are using cover crops to cut back on their use of fertilizer. Areas along rivers have been left fallow. The amount of nitrates flowing in Brittany’s seas fell to 70,000 tons in 2009 from 120,000 tons at the start of the decade, Brittany’s environmental watchdog says.
That’s still well above the amount needed for seaweed to flourish in Brittany’s shallow bays with France’s increasingly warm springs, says Guyomac’h, the environmentalist.
“We’ve been hearing for 10 years about the efforts being made by farmers, but their herds keep getting bigger,” said Rene Ropartz, the mayor of St. Michel-en-Greve. “I hope that for our children we’ll finally find a lasting solution to get us out of this nightmare.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vidya Root at vroot@bloomberg.net
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