French Tackle Oyster Thieves

Days before France's mammoth annual shellfish fest, gangs of marauding oyster-snatchers are forcing growers in Brittany and on the Atlantic coast to mount vigilante patrols, hire round-the-clock security guards and install alarm systems to protect the precious molluscs.

"The run-up to New Year's Eve is always popular with thieves, and this year is worse than most," said Henri Jenot, president of the South Brittany Oyster Farmers' Association. "It's a catastrophe for growers because we make half our annual turnover at this time of year."

Mr Jenot, from Carnac, said the most sought-after bivalves were those that had already been brought in from the open sea and were lying in "purification beds" ready for consumption.

"Those, and premium-grade 'flat' oysters," he said. "It's logical. They'll only steal what they can sell instantly, and those ones they can."

The French are the world's leading per capita consumers of oysters, cracking open some 1.8bn every year. Their gourmet gusto, which peaks at new year, keeps 8,300 farmers in business who between them turn over more than £155m annually.

Gendarmes say up to 85% of oyster thieves are professionals, often with an illicit order book.

Last month, a young grower from Marennes-Oleron near La Rochelle was sentenced to eight months in prison for having taken about 20 tonnes of oysters from his neighbours' beds over a three-week period.

Emmanuel Guilberteau, 25, told the court he had sold most of the molluscs even before he and his three accomplices had stolen them.

A major theft can tip a farmer into bankruptcy, said Florence Medec of the North Brittany association. "We all have to absorb minor thefts throughout the year, a few kilos at a time - it's unavoidable. But this business is tough enough without waking up one morning and finding half your annual profit has simply disappeared."

France's shellfish farmers are still recovering from the bitter double blow of the exceptionally violent winter storms which struck in December 1999 and wiped out more than a fifth of the Atlantic coast's 17,000 acres of oyster beds, and the shipwreck of the tanker Erika, which began spewing 3m gallons of heavy fuel oil on to exactly the same coastline a few days afterwards.

They are also battling the recently arrived threat of an oyster-eating Japanese winkle which can eat its way through a bed of oysters in weeks.

The fast-breeding, inch-long Ocinebrellus inornatus, native to southern Japan, drills a hole in the oyster's shell and sucks out its flesh. It is said to be "ideally installed" in the low walls between France's Atlantic coast oyster beds.

To combat the human robbers, who generally operate at dead of night with heavy-duty specialist equipment "borrowed" for the occasion, the farmers of Quiberon bay have pooled resources for a month to pay the wages of a security guard who watches over Europe's chief flat-oyster production area in a high-speed patrol boat.

Around Morbihan, some shellfish professionals are mounting their own guard, taking it in turns to walk the low walls of their purification beds during the hours of darkness, while others have hired professional security firms with guard dogs.

In northern Brittany, powerful spotlights will come on automatically if electronic detectors sense an intruder.