The United States and Canada are asking the European countries with the biggest appetites for live American lobster to help scuttle Sweden’s efforts to label Maine’s iconic crustacean an invasive species.
Although they still hope to avoid a continent-wide ban of live American lobster imports to the European Union with science, claiming the discovery of 32 American lobsters in the North Atlantic over the last decade doesn’t constitute an invasion, the North American countries are asking Italy, Spain and France to lobby against the proposed ban, too.
Those three countries account for 85 percent of the European Union’s $137.3 million live New England lobster import market, based on private export data culled from the U.S. Census Bureau.
