Agriculture Minister Petre Daea said Sunday of cormorants that “they deprive us of at least 30,000 or 40,000 tonnes” of fish a year. The minister also announced that a regulatory act is being introduced in parliament, according to which they can be shot all year round, and indicated that the population of cormorants, which now reaches “hundreds of thousands”, should remain at the level of 9 thousand.

“My friend has to leave the zone, because because of my friend… he is not my friend, he is someone else’s friend… this friend deprives us of at least 30-40 thousand tons a year. Cormorants eat more fish than Romanians and it took years to figure it out,” Minister Petre Daea said Sunday night on Prima News TV, News.ro reported.

The Minister of Agriculture stated that “the population of cormorants is more than one hundred thousand”.

Asked how much the cormorant population should reach, he said: “Well, according to cormorant conservationists, it would be about 9,000. We stop those, the rest… They count by number. Hunters know how to do it,” said the minister.

Petre Daea showed that the parliament has “a draft regulation that has passed the first checks, (through which) the cormorant can be shot all year round.”

“In a few years we have to come here to balance the ecosystem,” Daea also confirmed.

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