A Spanish tuna fishing vessel, the Playa de Anzoras, named after a beach in Spain, sailed under the Spanish flag until January 9, 2014. On January 10 that year, the 2,200-tonne vessel dropped the Spanish flag in favour of the Seychelles flag. Seychelles is a small archipelagic nation in the Indian Ocean.
Neither Spain nor continental Europe share a coast with the Indian Ocean, where Playa de Anzoras operates. Yet the European Union dominates tuna fisheries here and profits the most from it. This dominance is, in part, explained by ships like the Playa de Anzoras, which is flagged to Seychelles but ultimately controlled by European companies, according to records reviewed by Mongabay.
EU-controlled ships have pulled in the lion’s share of the region’s valuable yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) for more than three decades. Now, the stock is teetering on the verge of collapse. A plan to stop overfishing and restore it has failed.
This March, talks on the issue ended in a stalemate. The EU wants other members of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the intergovernmental agency charged with managing tuna fisheries in the region, which India is a part of, to be subject to greater restrictions. Meanwhile, some observers point to the EU’s own failure to play by the rules and save a stock that it profits so greatly from.
The Indian Ocean is ringed by developing countries, many of which have only in the last century gained independence from European colonial rule. Some see EU states’ grip over resources like tuna as the persistence of an exploitative relationship.
“The attitude of the EU is hypocritical and neo-colonial,” Nirmal Shah, chief executive of the non-profit Nature Seychelles and former head of the Seychelles Fishing Authority (SFA), told Mongabay. “You have some of the richest countries in the world overfishing and they are blaming poorer countries.”
Tuna fisheries are lucrative, feeding a market worth billions of dollars. The Indian Ocean is the second most productive tuna fishery in the world, and most of this tuna is caught in the western Indian Ocean.
In 1982, the U.N. recognised states’ sovereign rights to marine areas 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from their coasts, creating exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Seychelles, a fledgling nation that won independence from the U.K. in 1976, stood to benefit immensely. Between them, the 100 or so islands scattered just south of the equator in the western Indian Ocean carve out an EEZ of 1.37 million square kilometres (530,000 square miles), a little less than half the size of India.
Seychellois waters are a prime spot for tuna fishing, with yellowfin, bigeye (Thunnus obesus) and skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis) being the major catches there.
As tuna fisheries’ profitability in the Atlantic Ocean declined, European nations like Spain and France sought new fishing grounds. The formation of EEZs forced these countries to enter into agreements with poorer coastal states to feed the continent’s growing appetite for seafood. (The EU is second only to China in seafood consumption.)
“We have this amazing orchard of apple trees, and right now we do not have ladders to climb to them and collect the apples,” is how Jeremy Raguain, who works for the Seychelles Islands Foundation, described the situation. “E.U. and other countries, which have very advanced technology and ships, say: ‘look, we have the ladders to take these apples that you would not otherwise be able to get’.”
The EU has continued to subsidise fisheries over the years, while trying to purge those that lead to overexploitation. Reports that the EU is seeking to reintroduce allegedly harmful fishing subsidies as part of the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund have sparked alarm.
“Between 2021 and 2027, around seven billion euros of public money will be injected into the ocean economy. However, countless studies and reports show that the vast majority of the fund is used to encourage overfishing and fuel the demise of nature at sea,” a group of more than 100 scientists wrote in an open letter published in November 2020.
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