The EU Preaches Sustainable Fishing—but Is Emptying the Indian Ocean

Indian Ocean coastal states are increasingly concerned about dwindling stocks of overfished tuna species. Yet these nations say that negotiations to establish fairer catch allocations are being hampered by an actor located thousands of kilometres away: the EU. While the bloc has a raft of regulations and agreements on sustainable fishing, environmentalists say it is putting profits before principles and exerting ever-greater influence over the region’s fisheries through aid money leverage, ownership of local vessels and lobbying by industry representatives.

Sustainability may be the buzzword in Brussels when it comes to fishing practices and policies – but thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean, that mantra seems to be lost at sea. 

At least 20 per cent of all fish caught by European fishing boats are taken outside the bloc’s waters –such as in the Indian Ocean – often through fisheries agreements with third countries, according to the European Commission. 

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The EU says this is done sustainably and responsibly via regional agreements and bilateral deals that benefit vessels from its member states, mainly Spain and France. 

Much is at stake: in the Indian Ocean, two of the most valuable tuna stocks – bigeye and yellowfin – are under threat, having been categorised as overfished for a long time. 

For almost three decades, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), an intergovernmental regulatory body, has been trying to protect tuna populations by, for example, scrapping harmful practices and setting catch limits. Yet environmentalists say that the IOTC’s current regulations around fish stocks don’t go far enough and are crucially non-binding. 

“It might be a remnant of colonialism”

To better protect the species, many African and Asian coastal states have long been calling for new allocation of quotas that they say would be fairer and more sustainable. Yet, the EU appears to be putting its commercial interests above its conservation principles by rejecting such appeals, a Follow the Money investigation shows. 

For the investigation, FTM analysed IOTC documents and data, and conducted interviews with fisheries experts and insiders. 

The EU’s ever-greater influence on the future of fishing in the Indian Ocean is both opaque and varied, from the growing number of industry lobbyists it sends to IOTC meetings to the power it wields over member nations such as Mauritius, the Seychelles, Kenya and Oman, through ties to their vessels and sustainable fisheries partnership agreements (SFPAs) with their governments. 

Activists and representatives from the region say this is allowing the EU to harvest depleted stocks of tuna while ignoring coastal states’ concerns and proposals to boost populations.

“It might be a remnant of colonialism,” said Indra Jaya, an academic who has headed Indonesia’s delegation in allocation negotiations at the IOTC since 2012.

Martin Purves, managing director of the International Pole and Line Foundation, an NGO that backs small-scale fisheries, went even further in his appraisal of the EU’s behaviour.

“I see the EU as quite a destructive force in the IOTC,” he told FTM in an interview. 

A European Commission spokesperson said the bloc’s goal was to ensure the sustainability of fisheries while “defending the European interests and a level playing field” among members of international organisations such as the IOTC. 

Arguing over allocation

The history of European fisheries in the Indian Ocean stretches back to the 1980s. 

When tuna stocks declined in the eastern Atlantic, Spanish and French purse seiners – commercial vessels that use large nets to target large quantities of fish – began fishing in waters off the coast of East Africa. 

In the late 1980s, the EU started signing bilateral fishing partnerships with countries in the region, such as the Seychelles. Those deals are now known as the bloc’s SFPAs. 

However, over the last decade or so, the EU has been at loggerheads with many coastal states in the Indian Ocean over the issue of allocating fish quotas in a sustainable manner. 

The IOTC has a scientific body that recommends a maximum catch limit for each stock, which is known as Total Allowable Catch (TAC). This sets an annual total for how much the IOTC members combined can fish in the Indian Ocean, in a bid to tackle overfishing. 

Yet the TAC for different species has been exceeded several times over the years, leading the IOTC to put forward measures such as individual catch limits for member states. However, these restrictions are non-binding and have been opposed by various countries in the region. 

In 2021, the IOTC adopted a resolution setting a catch limit for each IOTC member for yellowfin tuna. That didn’t fly well with several countries, with six nations objecting to it, including India, Indonesia and Madagascar. They opted out from following the limits.

“I see the EU as quite a destructive force in the IOTC”

So although the IOTC members might agree on the size of the overall pie – the TAC – since they don’t agree on how to divide it, too much fish gets caught overall.

The TAC has also been criticised by NGOs such as the Blue Marine Foundation due to a lack of transparency – which means the IOTC does not know if nations are nearing their prescribed limits –and a delay between catches being recorded and compliance being monitored. 

Gorka Merino, a researcher at AZTI in Spain and the chair of the IOTC’s scientific working group that deals with tropical tuna, said that there has also been uncertainty around the commission’s catch limit assessment model – including from some of its own scientists – which has further complicated efforts to secure consensus around allocations from the members. 

“So … we say: ‘I'm telling you, you can't fish that much’. But also I'm telling you: ‘I'm quite uncertain about it’,” Merino told FTM. In December, the scientific committee released a new assessment model, in which they don’t categorise yellowfin as overfished anymore, although they recommend proceeding with caution. However, due to uncertainties about the model, Merino explained in an email that they will keep the catch limits for another year, while they address those concerns. 

Since 2011, there have been 16 official meetings between IOTC members about establishing new allocations – which would be used to distribute the TAC among the members – but there has been little progress on the issue, several insiders and regional representatives told FTM. 

One important sticking point is how the EU is classified within the IOTC.

The EU argues that it can fish as much as it does because it considers itself a coastal state in the Indian Ocean: the islands of Reunion and Mayotte – located off the coast of southeastern Africa – are French overseas territories. Many IOTC members disagree with this label, seeing the EU instead as a “distant water fishing nation’” that is granted the right to fish there through contractual arrangements rather than through countries’ intrinsic right to fish at their own coasts.

This distinction is important, as is the EU’s history of fishing in the Indian Ocean, because negotiations over fish allocations are being hampered by the issue of historical catches.

While it is broadly accepted that historical catches should be a factor in the allocation of the new quotas, the EU does not see eye to eye with other IOTC members about how to define it.

The EU delegation has stated to the IOTC that the fishing it has conducted in the past in the Indian Ocean should be reflected in future quotas, meaning that the stocks it caught within the water of other coastal states before they had industrial fisheries should count in its favour. 

However, several IOTC members in the region argue that these historical catches should benefit the country whose waters were fished in, rather than who caught the fish (the EU in this case). For example, tuna caught by French and Spanish ships decades ago in Kenyan maritime territory would therefore count towards Kenya’s quota rather than the EU’s. 

“When this criterion or this indicator of allocating the resources is based on the historical catch, that puts the coastal states in a very disadvantaged position,” said Jaya of Indonesia. 

“In the old days these states didn't have any fishing fleet,” he added. “Now they have the aspiration to develop their own fisheries, but since they don’t have the catch history, that really puts them at a disadvantage.”

Europe’s clout at sea

This is important for these coastal states given the capability of the EU vessels in the Indian Ocean, and their huge catches relative to the limited size of the fleet. 

According to the IOTC’s database of ships with active licenses in the area in 2023, there were 26 European purse seiners: 13 Spanish, 12 French and one Italian vessel.

While Indonesia is also a major purse seining nation, the EU’s fleet in the Indian Ocean consists almost exclusively of these ships.

Purse seiners are known for using fish aggregating devices (FADs) – large floating objects, typically made of plastic – to attract massive groups of tuna. Many environmentalists and NGOs say FADs contribute to pollution and overfishing, and their use has been another point of contention between the EU and other members at IOTC meetings in recent years. 

While only around 6 per cent of the ships with an active license to fish in the Indian Ocean in 2023 were purse seiners, they caught 54.4 per cent of all skipjack tuna, 45.7 per cent of bigeye tuna, and 32.5 per cent of yellowfin tuna, according to IOTC data.

Even though the European fleet makes up just 1.2 per cent of licensed vessels in the area, it netted between 10 and 19 per cent of the catch of those three species respectively in 2023.

EU lobbyists take the lead

Many of the sources that FTM spoke to described the EU’s power within the IOTC as disproportionate, and referred to heavy lobbying from the European fishing industry. 

In IOTC negotiations about tuna stock allocations, the EU has sent bigger delegations than anyone else, often consisting mainly of industry representatives, according to a 2023 report by the NGO Bloom. 

Out of the 2,278 delegates from 30 nations who attended the annual IOTC meetings between 2002 and 2022, one in five represented the EU, Bloom’s research found. 

In one meeting about allocation of quotas in 2023, the EU had by far the biggest delegation, with 15 delegates representing 70 EU ships that were licensed to fish in the Indian Ocean. 

Three of the EU delegates were from the French purse seiner industry association Orthongel, and one represented Sapmer, one of the largest French tuna companies.

“I find it extremely frustrating that, despite the urgent need for recovery measures for some tuna stocks in recent years, it has been impossible to reach an agreement”

Indonesia, meanwhile, only had two delegates (Jaya was one of them) despite having 569 licensed vessels in the area. 

Since 2015, when many coastal states started demanding a fairer share of catches and calling for stronger environmental protections, the EU has nearly doubled the size of its delegations at the IOTC annual meetings, and included more lobbyists, Bloom’s research showed.

In fact, from 2016 to 2022, the EU delegation has consisted of more industry lobbyists (47 per cent) than public authority representatives (43 per cent) or scientists (8 per cent), Bloom found.

The spokesperson for the European Commission said the “positions taken by the EU in the negotiations reflect only the mandate received from the Council [of the EU] and is not influenced by the presence or not, of stakeholders in the EU delegation”.

Yet environmentalists say this imbalance and concentration of influence for the EU is thwarting a push by many IOTC members to achieve consensus on allocations.

“I find it extremely frustrating that, despite the urgent need for recovery measures for some tuna stocks in recent years, it has been impossible to reach an agreement,” said Ignacio Fresco Vanzini, senior policy advisor at Oceana in Europe, a marine conservation organisation. 

Leveraging aid

The EU also holds sway over fishing negotiations in the Indian Ocean through European companies’ ownership of the vessels of other IOTC members.

FTM has found, with the help of Oceana and using data from Triton from C4ADS, that the 13 purse seiners registered by the Seychelles in 2024 all had ultimate beneficial owners in Spain. Meanwhile, of the three purse seiners registered by Mauritius, two had beneficial ownership in Panama  and one in Spain. The one Kenya-flagged Purse seiner was also owned by by a Spanish company. Earlier this year, three purse seiners were sold and reflagged to Oman, but are still under French control: the French company remained beneficial owner and maintained control of the ships. The company also took control of two other Omani ships. 

This means the representatives of these countries are in effect representing the European industry, according to several of the activists and analysts interviewed by FTM.

For example, in April 2023, the Seychelles government sent a document to the IOTC containing comments about its catch reporting.

This document, which was provided to FTM by a source, showed that “tracked changes” had been made by Europeche, the representative body for fishermen in the EU. 

The paper was later taken down from IOTC’s website and a new one was published with anonymous comments in the document, but was provided to us by Bloom, a French NGO. 

Frédéric Le Manach from the NGO Bloom said that the EU is getting increasingly stronger at the IOTC negotiating table because of its ownership of other countries’ fleets. 

“You also have countries that are always on the side of the EU because they have EU-owned but locally flagged vessels,” he said. 

The EU has been accused by Bloom of leveraging development aid with countries such as the  Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar, as well as “blue economy” agreements with Kenya and Tanzania. 

In February 2023, Kenya had led on a proposal to ban certain FADs for three months every year within IOTC waters, but withdrew from its own motion on the day of the vote. According to Bloom, the European Commission had pushed Kenya to drop the proposal by citing the blue economy agreement.

The Commission told FTM that it had not pressured other IOTC members to follow its agenda.

“Our relations and negotiations with other states are based on partnership and respect,” a spokesperson said. 

However, Vanya Vulperhorst, campaign manager at Oceana Europe pointed out that the EU needs to have better transparency. EU owners were, she said, often hiding behind complex corporate structures that “exploit fisheries resources in non-EU countries”. 

“It is crucial that EU Member States investigate financial flows to the EU from possible illegal fishing,” she said. “Fighting illegal fishing requires acting against those who ultimately benefit from it and the solution is making key information public.”

While the prospects for an agreement on catch allocation are not positive, there will need to be consensus soon to prevent populations plummeting, according to Jaya of Indonesia.

“I think we should come to an agreement and maybe not we will not satisfy everyone, but at least there is something in place that we can work on together to save these resources from further decline,” he said. 

“The longer these allocation agreements that they keep from happening by dragging on and on, everyone will lose because the stock is getting worse and worse.”