Foreign tuna fishing companies, mostly from Asia, have been exploiting Madagascar’s waters since the 1950s. The bloc that is now the European Union joined the hunt in 1986 and didn’t stop for decades, renewing its deal with Madagascar every few years.
Yet when the last Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA), as the deals are now called, expired at the end of 2018, negotiations on a new one had reached a standstill — and there they remained. For four and a half years, no vessels flagged to EU countries could fish in Madagascar’s waters.
Finally, in late June, Madagascar and the EU signed a new SFPA. The EU says the deal benefits Madagascar by providing key funding for fisheries governance, and civil society groups praised the Madagascar government for creating a more inclusive and transparent negotiating process than in the past.
However, critics argue that the deal benefits neither the Malagasy people nor the European public to a large degree, but rather a narrow set of private interests: fishing companies. They point out that the three main commercial tuna species in the Indian Ocean are overfished, and they say the EU will merely be adding to the overexploitation.
“[H]ow can the EU continue to brand their agreements ‘sustainable’ in the region, with … yellowfin overfished since 2015, bigeye overfished since 2022, and skipjack fished way over scientific advice for years,” Frédéric Le Manach, scientific director of BLOOM Association, a French nonprofit, told Mongabay in an email. “This is pure greenwashing at work here.”
Two of the main types of industrial tuna-fishing vessels are purse seiners, which cinch catch in enormous nets, and longliners, which drop hundreds or thousands of hooks on lines that can stretch kilometers. The new SFPA, which took provisional effect July 1, pending approval of the EU parliament, grants places for 32 purse seiners and 33 longliners, almost all of them reserved for vessels owned by Spanish and French companies. Previous SFPAs allotted the EU more vessels, but the EU didn’t use them all.
The deal could end up bringing 12.8 million euros ($14 million) into Madagascar’s coffers by June 2027, when it expires. The EU agreed to pay 1.8 million euros ($2 million) per year over four years, a similar rate to the previous deal, which lasted from 2015 until 2018. Most of that money is earmarked to support Malagasy fisheries governance, including monitoring and surveillance. In addition, European ship owners must pay fees and advances, which have increased since the last deal and could ultimately be worth 5.6 million euros ($6.1 million) over the course of the agreement.
There were “intense discussions” over the financial terms, during eight rounds of negotiations, an official from the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, told Mongabay in an emailed statement. The EU was “constrained” in what it could offer by the commercial value of the tuna, said the official, who declined to be named, citing commission policy.