ARE SPANISH FLEETS PILLAGING OUR OCEANS.?

Spain, one of the world’s big fishing nations, is hosting this year’s United Nations climate change conference on the health of our oceans. But its own record on damaging the marine environment, by trawling the seabed with huge nets and by removing vast tonnages of fish, is believed by many scientists to adversely affect the sea’s ability to act as a carbon sink. In this sense Spain is a deplorable choice as host nation.

Spain had by far the largest fishing fleet in Europe when it acceded to the EU in 1986. It still does. The reason why it is so large dates back to the “navalist ideology”, an imperialistic way of thinking which arose in Spain around the turn of the 20th century. But the Spanish fleet’s greatest expansion dates from the time of Generalissimo Franco, whose policy of protectionism and intervention favoured shipbuilding. The disproportionate size of the Spanish fishing fleet today is one of the unremarked legacies of fascism.

If Germany continued to drive its Panzer divisions over the plains of Europe, it would not go unnoticed. Yet hardly anyone makes the connection when Spain’s subsidy-driven fishing fleet works its way around the oceans of the world — and often turns a blind eye to the rules as it does so. That could be partly because these days it is dwarfed by the Chinese fleet, also built on subsidies and out of scale with the planet’s resource of wild fish.

The size of the Spanish fishing fleet was supposed to be capped by the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. In fact, the Spanish fleet escaped limits by fishing in international waters as well as in the territorial waters of, and under the flags of, developing nations. Spain was penalised by the EU for catching too much yellowfin tuna in the Indian Ocean in 2017. Now experts have found the Spanish fleet to have caught 13,500 tons too much of this overfished stock last year, a catch worth tens of millions of euros, stolen largely from developing countries. Spain disputes the figures. The European Commission has opened an investigation.

The Spanish government recently removed Franco’s body from its mausoleum near Madrid to signal a break with the past. Its next step should be to curtail another part of his malign legacy: a fishing fleet that is still pillaging the oceans.

Charles Clover is executive director of Blue Marine Foundation, a conservation charity

Spain
Science
Global politics
European Union
Europe
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