Ms Caroline Bocquel:

The short answer to the Senator is "Not currently". There are no specific financial supports there. BIM provides a range of supports. We provide non-financial support in terms of husbandry techniques and information. We have some sampling systems that can effectively provide a form of early warning to the farm. We provide a lot of technical support to the entire aquaculture sector in terms of trying to ensure that the farms are as resilient as they can possibly be. There are no targeted supports we can give in the event of a disaster through the funding mechanism we have at the moment. The EMFAF regulation has a specific provision for providing support in the event of what it calls market failure, which is again quite a narrow definition, but it needs an implementing decision from the Commission, that is, all the member states need to vote for it. We have had it only twice: once for Covid and a second time for the invasion of Ukraine.

It is very difficult to trigger that particular mechanism. That is what is available to us, so it is very narrow. Certainly, we provide all of the supports that we can but we are limited in what we can access.