Abstract
The imperative to increase seafood supply while dealing with its overfished local stocks has pushed the European Union (EU) and its Member States to fish in the Exclusive Economic Zones of other countries through various types of fishing agreements for decades. Although European public fishing agreements are commented on regularly and considered to be transparent, this is the first global and historical study on the fee regime that governs them. We find that the EU has subsidized these agreements at an average of 75% of their cost (financial contribution agreed upon in the agreements), while private European business interests paid the equivalent of 1.5% of the value of the fish that was eventually landed. This raises questions of fisheries benefit-sharing and resource-use equity that the EU has the potential to address during the nearly completed reform of its Common Fisheries Policy.
Highlights
50% of Atlantic and 80% of Mediterranean marine resources are estimated to be overfished in European waters [1,2,3], Europe’s seafood demand continues to rise
Joint scientific committees and regional fisheries management organizations are currently responsible for assessing the health of exploited stocks and setting fishing limits for both coastal and pelagic species targeted under European public fishing access agreements
Agreements and Authorized Fishing Effort The number of European public fishing access agreements steeply increased after the implementation of the Common Fisheries Policy in 1983, from two during the 1980–1983 period (Senegal and Guinea-Bissau) to 16 in 1991 (Figure 3A)
Summary
50% of Atlantic and 80% of Mediterranean marine resources are estimated to be overfished in European waters [1,2,3], Europe’s seafood demand continues to rise. In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was adopted, and its Article 62 forced distant-water fishing countries interested in fishing more (such as member countries of the EU) to sign fishing access agreements with host countries having a ‘surplus’ of resource, if they wished to fish within their 200 nm EEZs [12] This Article is, based on two ambiguous notions, i.e., (i) that the ‘maximum sustainable yield’ can be estimated for most stocks in question, which is often impossible in developing countries [13,14,15]; and (ii) that the ‘total catch’ of these countries is known, which has been demonstrated not to be the case in all countries so far examined [16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. This is the case for the agreement with Mauritania, for example, which includes fishing possibilities for sardinella (Sardinella aurita) and cephalopds (mainly Octopus vulgaris), two overexploited stocks which together represent more than 50% of the landings of local artisanal fisheries but for which surpluses no longer exist [28,29,30]
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