When you buy fish in the supermarket, you're supposed to be able to tell where it came from and how it was caught. But one thing is missing: are you supporting a small, local fisher, or did the fish in your hand come from a mega-corporation pushing the former out of business?
After a life at sea, José Correia doesn't want his son to follow the same path – the work as a fisher is physically challenging and the income unattractive. José's community in Angeiras, a village on Portugal’s northern coast, is ageing fast. He now counts only “five or six” young fishers.
The same is happening around Europe: only one in four artisanal fishers in the EU are under 40.
Small boats constitute around 76% of the EU's active fishing fleet and almost half the workforce, according to Seas At Risk, an environmental group. But they land only about 7% of catches by weight.
The rest goes into the hands of bigger players. Just five Dutch groups control around 16% of the EU fleet when measured in tonnes.
Small-scale fishers are also catching much less than they used to. Between 2018 and 2022, their catch value shrank around 30% in the Mediterranean, 36% in the Baltic, and 50% in the Black Sea, according to a European Commission report.
Brian O’Riordan, policy adviser at Low Impact Fishers of Europe (LIFE), says the fishing sector is in a “dire” spot, and “at a crossroads”. Fish are getting scarcer due to overfishing, climate change, and pollution. Besides, he argues, small operators face disadvantages in access to quotas, markets, and decision-making.
The imbalance is felt at sea. After bigger vessels operate close to shore, artisanal fishers sometimes need to wait a week for a decent catch. To Bruno Nicostrate, senior fisheries policy officer at Seas At Risk, supertrawlers have no place in sustainable fishing. “They should not exist,” he told The European Correspondent.
Meant to keep fishing sustainable, quotas – limits on how much of a fish stock can be caught – are a very coveted asset for EU member states and subject to fierce negotiations in Brussels. However, the system can reinforce inequalities as small fishers sell their allowances to larger operators.
“Some northern Danish harbours lost their fishing communities as people sold quotas and left,” Nicostrate told TEC. Fishers might do this to change jobs, make a profit, or retire.
Even on the Iberian Peninsula, where quota transfers are very restricted, small-scale workers feel left behind.
Jorge Fernandes, a Portuguese fisherman who first went to sea in the 1970s, worries about income insecurity, he told TEC while preparing his nets for the next day of work on the Algarve coast. “Big players buy at whatever price they want. It's all in their hands,” he said.
As O’Riordan puts it, artisanal fishing is often sustained by people willing to accept lower earnings to continue a profession inherited across generations.
The pressure is also visible in Galicia, Spain, where shellfish gathering (marisqueo), which is predominantly done by women, is disappearing. Sandra Menéndez represents Mulleres Salgadas (Galician for “salty women”), an association in the fishing sector, and told TEC that many who once took pride in their work now “feel abandoned” as policies favour larger fish-farming businesses.
Besides market concentration by big corporations, the impacts of climate change, including warmer water and lower water salinity due to intense rainfall, also play a role in the challenges faced by these fishers.
Meanwhile, their techniques are the ones friendlier to the ecosystem. According to Seas At Risk, small boats generally use less fuel and generate less by-catch and discards. On the other hand, big vessels remove huge volumes of fish from one area, with significant impacts on the ecosystem.
In supermarkets, it's difficult for consumers to distinguish who has caught their fish, and in some cases retailers are part of the game.
One example worrying civil society organisations is Intermarché, which owns the fishing fleet Scapêche. BLOOM, an NGO advocating for ocean health and artisanal fishers, argued that the group can afford lower margins, or even losses, at the fishing stage because it can recover its profits when the fish is sold to consumers.
EU rules mandate product labels to tell buyers the species of the catch, the area it was caught in, and the gear used, but not whether the fish came from a small boat or an industrial vessel. Unlike with other foods such as eggs, whose labels display their production methods, we don't know what kind of business or practices we're supporting when buying fish.
