They will be able to spend the end of year holidays in the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. And even stay there until the end of the season scheduled for January. It has been decades since small mussels that do not meet the AOP criteria have become accustomed to being dumped into the bay, mussel farmers not knowing what to do with these mussels which represent between 15 and 30% of their annual production.
But for two years, this “tradition” has been criticized by the courts, with the Rennes administrative court ruling in favor of environmental associations who requested the suspension of the prefectural decree authorizing this spreading. As a result, the producers had no other choice than to dump their small, unsaleable mussels at the entrance to the small port of Vivier-sur-Mer (Ille-et-Vilaine), generating significant olfactory nuisances.
The perfectly legal order according to the administrative court
Not affected by these two setbacks, the prefect of Ille-et-Vilaine again issued a decree on July 4 to authorize the practice again for the season. Three environmental associations then applied to the administrative court at the end of October to request the suspension of the decree.
But this time the courts did not agree with them and validated the spraying authorization on December 1, considering in particular that the order in dispute was perfectly legal contrary to what the associations argued.