The seas they pillage
The European Union presents itself to the world as the gold standard of regulated, enlightened governance. Nowhere is the gap between that self-image and reality more vivid than in its management, or rather mismanagement, of the seas. The Common Fisheries Policy, now over four decades old, stands as one of the more instructive monuments to what happens when a bureaucratic cartel manages a commons. Everyone takes as much as they can, the resource collapses, and Brussels announces a new action plan.
Damage begins with the seabed itself. Bottom trawling, dragging heavy weighted nets across the ocean floor, takes place in 90% of offshore EU Marine Protected Areas. This means that ninety percent of waters formally designated as protected are being scraped clean by industrial fleets. Bottom trawling occurs in 77% of France's, 85% of Germany's, and 44% of Italy's marine Natura 2000 sites, areas supposed to be safe havens for wildlife.
The physical consequences are not abstractions. Nearly 80% of the EU's coastal seabed has been physically disturbed, primarily because of bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU's coastal area is thought to have lost its natural seabed habitats. 92% of all EU fish discards come from bottom trawled catches. It is one of the most comprehensively destructive technologies ever applied to nature, using fishing nets as tall as a three-storey building, indifferent to what they catch, and annihilating centuries of accumulated marine habitat in a single pass.
The discards problem deserves separate attention. For decades, the CFP's quota system produced one of the great inanities of modern regulation: fishermen legally obliged to throw dead fish back into the sea because they had caught the ‘wrong’ species or exceeded their quota for a particular stock. The EU introduced a ‘landing obligation’ in 2015 to end this, but it has created choke species situations and early fishery closures without delivering the expected improvements in selectivity, despite fishers' investments in new technologies. In solving one problem it manufactured several others, which is a reasonably accurate summary of the CFP's entire history,
The Mediterranean, which EU countries treat as a private lake, has fared worst of all. While overfished stocks in the Atlantic declined from 82% to 41% over the decade to 2024, the Mediterranean lags badly, with 62% of stocks still overexploited. The Baltic has been no better. Herring stocks there collapsed due to poor recruitment, forcing emergency closures, a consequence of sustained overfishing that regulators saw coming and declined to act upon in time.
There is also the foreign policy dimension, which rarely features in Brussels press releases. The EU has spent forty-five years signing ‘Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements,’ a phrase whose euphemism does considerable work, with developing nations across West Africa and the Pacific. Spain alone maintains a fleet of over 200 trawlers off the coast of West Africa. These agreements ostensibly pay for access to ‘surplus’ stocks, but the very concept of surplus depends on data the host governments are not always equipped to verify, and which there is little incentive to collect honestly.
The round sardinella, a species crucial for food security and employment across Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia, constitutes a shared stock among those four nations. The EU buys access from Mauritania and Morocco without compensating Senegal and Gambia for fish that partially belongs to them. One struggles to imagine the EU tolerating such an arrangement were the boot on the other foot.
In October 2023, the Joint Scientific Committee overseeing the EU-Mauritania fisheries agreement issued a report that amounted to an indictment of EU fishing fleets in the West African region. There was no great outcry in Brussels. The agreements continue.
What makes this story particularly worth telling is the EU's simultaneous posture as global environmental champion. It lectures other nations on biodiversity loss. It signs the Kunming-Montreal framework. It announces ocean protection targets for 2030. And while the speeches are being given, more than 32,800 hours of bottom trawling are recorded annually over protected sandbanks in Germany's Wadden Sea alone. Fisheries, particularly by large vessels with destructive gears, continue to be the leading cause of marine biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation through seabed damage, high rates of by-catch, and high CO2 emissions.
The European Commission's own decade-long evaluation, published in 2026, acknowledges the scale of the failure plainly. Fish stock rebuilding is lagging, economic performance is declining, and the policy has not achieved the level of sustainability gains originally anticipated. The Commissioner responded by noting that ‘a decade of the common fisheries policy has put Europe on a more sustainable path.’ On present evidence, one can only conclude that the path began somewhere considerably worse than anyone had admitted.
The lesson here is not that fishing is wicked or that fishermen are villains. Most are not, and many small-scale operators have suffered as much as the fish from a policy designed to serve larger industrial interests. The lesson is rather that centralised management of a shared resource, captured by the industries it regulates, reliably produces overexploitation, and that the greater the distance between the regulator and the seabed, the more elaborate the gap between the declared objective and the actual outcome. The CFP has managed simultaneously to deplete European waters, to strip food security from West African coastal communities, and to dignify all of this with the language of sustainability. That is quite an achievement. Brussels should perhaps be congratulated on its consistency, if nothing else.
Madsen Pirie