A new fishing law could cause destruction for the industry. In the name of environmentalism, new EU legislation seeks to reduce by 79% the days allowed to trawling. This measure will destroy 17,000 jobs, a substantial blow to the sector.
2025 has started with very bad news for fishermen all over the Mediterranean, especially from Spain. The EU commission has approved the Multiannual Plan for Fisheries in the Western Mediterranean. The project aims to preserve “economic development and sustainability of the species fished in the Mediterranean sea”. The reality is quite different. By slashing the number of days when they can trawl, it will leave thousands bankrupt.
The EU Commission has stipulated if fishing crews do not implement onerous sustainability measures, they must reduce their working days from 150 to 27, a 79% drop, which almost seems designed to put them out of business. There is not even any transition time. Predictably, the fishing sector is in crisis.
The EU’s solution? Subsidies. Mitigate the harm from unnecessary new regulation by dishing out public money. In this case, Brussels is offering 1.12 million euros from the FEMPA (European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund). It will first need to pass through the Spanish government and the autonomous communities. In other words, that money will get lost in the maze of bureaucracy or, at best, arrive on time and provide a temporary (and very expensive) stopgap to kick the can down the road and delay the moment when the Mediterranean fishing industry collapses in on itself.
“It would mean the disappearance of the 556 boats of the trawling fleet on the Mediterranean coast and the destruction of 17,000 jobs,” concludes a statement from eight fishing entities from the autonomous communities affected; Comunidad Valenciana, Cataluña, Andalucía, Baleares, and Murcia.
Nevertheless, Brussels defends the decision. The programme, which came into force in January 2020, had the aim of achieving in 2025 the Maximum Sustainable Yield of coastal species.
To make matters worse, the EU’s justification for this latest bout of green overregulation is, according to the investigations of Javier Garat, president of the Spanish Fish Confederation, based on “obsolete data” from years ago, when the plan started. “After five years of significant sacrifices in the sector, fishing days have been reduced by 40%, a series of technical measures have been applied to, for example, improve the selectivity of trawling to avoid the capture of juveniles” argues Garat. Nevertheless, Brussels seems to not take into account any of the remarkable concessions the fishing sector has made in recent years.
This is not the only decision the EU has taken recently which directly affected this industry in the Mediterranean. In October 2024, the European Court of Justice definitively rejected the agricultural and fishing trade agreements between member states and Morocco, considering they do not have the consent of the people of Western Sahara. The dissolution of these agreements, which has been going on for ten years, is already hitting the fishing sector hard.
The Spanish fleet will not be able to catch anchovies, sardines, hake, voracious fish, or bream. Instead, those fish could be caught by the Moroccan fleet or by the fleets of other countries which can fish in Moroccan waters. The government in Rabbat had already expressed its interest in the possibility of reaching an agreement on this matter with the United Kingdom or Russia.
The European Commission approved a plan which it knew would deeply harm the fishing sector based on obsolete data without taking into account other agreements made recently which already weaken the industry. The plan was not approved by the fishermen, the patronal, the agriculture minister of Spain, Luis Planas, or even the last commissioner of the EU, Virginijus Sinkevičius, who claimed not to be happy with the result achieved by the Commission. Brussels must abandon it. The plan is nothing short of a disaster.
Victoria Esperanza Pazos Álvarez is a policy fellow with Young Voices Europe. She previously studied international relations in Spain and specialised in disaster risk reduction in the Netherlands. Victoria formerly worked at the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires, where she worked on trade negotiations.