Fishing for profit. How EU tuna deals leave Madagascar behind

As with any extractive industry, the core logic driving industrial fishing is to maximise catches while minimising costs. Up to 6% of the total tuna imported into Europe is harvested by EU-flagged vessels in the Indian Ocean, establishing the region as a major player in a market projected to reach $1.98 billion by 2033. However, deploying European fleets in the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of other countries is often prohibitively expensive – unless the European Commission intervenes.

Through Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements (SFPAs), the EU negotiates access to the waters of mainly African nations in exchange for financial support and investments in local fisheries. In 2025 alone, €156.7 million from the EU's Common Fisheries Policy budget was allocated to these deals, with 12 currently in force – seven of which focus on tuna. While these agreements are officially presented as a means of promoting environmental sustainability and supporting local economies, many NGOs and environmental campaigners claim that they primarily serve to subsidise European industry interests.

This article takes a closer look at one of the most controversial of these agreements: the SFPA between the European Union and Madagascar. Touted as a model of sustainable cooperation, it instead reveals the tensions, imbalances and ecological risks beneath the surface of EU fisheries diplomacy.

Subsidies for Europe, scraps for Madagascar

In 2023, a new SFPA was signed between Madagascar and the EU, granting over 65 European fishing vessels (33 longliners and 32 purse seiners) access to Madagascar’s EEZ. For just €12.8 million over four years – less than the market value of a single industrial tuna haul – EU industries gained the right to extract 14,000 tonnes of tuna annually from Malagasy waters.

According to data provided directly by Madagascar's Minister of Fisheries, Paubert Mahatante, without the agreement, a European purse seiner of 3,000 Gross Tonnage or above would pay up to 537,000 dollars per year to obtain access, which would probably lead to costs exceeding the benefits of such a deal.

Madagascar is one of the poorest regions in Africa. About 85,000 fishermen live in coastal areas where they face acute food shortages and are among those most exposed to extreme weather events related to climate change, such as droughts and cyclones. In the south-western Toliara (Antsimo-Andreafana) region, the poorest in the country, there are 196 fishing villages with almost 8,000 fishing families. Most of these families belong to the Vezu people, an ethnic group of fishermen who traditionally navigate using wooden pirogues with basic sails. They currently live in conditions of extreme poverty and malnutrition, with limited access to basic hygiene services. 

Climate change and the scarcity of marine resources are further endangering the food security of these people, as cyclones destroy their homes and droughts force ethnic groups from inland areas, such as the Masikoro, Mahafaly and Tanalagna, to migrate to the coast and rely on fish resources to survive. This creates unsustainable competition over marine resources, which could escalate into conflict.

As stated in the SFPA, one of the EU's objectives is to implement a multiannual sectoral support programme, which should include spending €4,400,000 on supporting small-scale and traditional fishing, training fishers, and monitoring, controlling and surveilling fishing activities. However, local authorities and experts are unable to confirm the existence of a single active EU-funded project.

When asked, Mirantsaina Andrianalinera, the national director of the Agence Malgache de la Pêche et de l'Aquaculture (AMPA) – the organisation within the Ministry of Fisheries responsible for managing the SFPA's sectoral development funds – could not provide evidence of impact, only vague lists of life jackets, fishing equipment, and boats totalling nearly half a million euros intended for thousands of people. No one knows who received them. No one knows where they are.

“If this is what sectoral support looks like, then the programme is failing – if not by design, then certainly by neglect,” claims a local source who has worked to support local fishermen for over a decade and who prefers to remain anonymous. According to this source, the material provided by the government shows a complete lack of interest in systematically supporting the small fisheries sector.

Even worse, it manifests a slight irreverence: “Considering that a single pirogue uses an average of up to 1 km of net per day, 300 nets of 100 metres each is a wholly inadequate quantity! Similarly, a hundred 100-metre lines with 20 hooks are insufficient for fishermen as they use at least 50 hooks for every 100 metres and often even 100. With just 20 hooks, this does not come close to covering a day's fishing needs.”

Professor Gyldas Todinanahary, from the University of Toliara, is coordinating the only active project in the region that effectively supports small-scale fishing communities. According to him, the main actions needed in the region to improve the conditions of fishermen are to restore fish stocks within the coral reef by using anchored Fishing Aggregating Devices and to improve fishermen's access to the market by creating cold storage facilities and facilitating transport.

Professor Todinanahary claims that he has never heard of EU funds being allocated to support small-scale fisheries, and confirms that his project has not received money from the SFPA. “I don’t know of any other project that works closely with fishermen to address their needs. They may have given some boats and life jackets to certain communities, as they claim, but to me, this is not what sectorial support means. These programmes make no effort to guarantee long-term benefits.”

Meanwhile, fishing communities are struggling due to an increasing lack of food security.

Nestor Armand, president of FIMIHARA, one of the major fishing associations in the Toliara region, is concerned about the future of fishing communities: “The sea is changing. There are fewer and fewer fish, and more and more people going fishing. They are coming from inland because of droughts, and they fish with mosquito nets, which destroy the coral reef and its ecosystem.”

Like many other fishing associations, Nestor's is part of MIHARI, a nationwide network of locally managed marine areas (LMMA), in which fishing communities are responsible for protecting, conserving and managing marine ecosystems. Manahadraza Herman, the regional president of MIHARI in Toliara, shares the same concerns and is surprised to hear about the SFPA funds supposedly invested in the region. “I have never heard about it, which is very strange given that they claim to support small-scale fisheries here in the region,” says Herman. “Fishermen's communities are facing increasing pressure from climate change and experiencing a worrying scarcity of resources that threatens their food security.”

Sustainable on paper, not at sea

Alongside small-scale fisheries development, one of the SFPA's main pillars is strengthening monitoring and surveillance activities to mitigate the ecological impacts of intensive tuna fishing and reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

In the north of Madagascar, in Mahajanga, home to the largest surveillance fleet, we discover a bitter reality: most of the vessels are stranded on land due to a lack of financial resources to sustain operations. The national director of the Centre de Surveillance de Pêche (CSP), Fanazava Rijasoa, made this claim during an interview at the harbour in Mahajanga: “We have the boats, but we often can't cover the fuel costs.”

Rijasoa also provided Voxeurop with striking data in a private phone conversation: in 2024, EU vessels fished more tuna than agreed in the SFPA – 20,386 tonnes instead of 14,000 tonnes. This is a worrying figure, given that EU vessels are fishing in an area where yellowfin tuna has been declared overfished for the past ten years, reaching a peak in 2022 when it surpassed the maximum sustainable yield.

However, according to Mahatante Paubert, Madagascar's Minister of Fisheries, there is no ongoing issue with yellowfin tuna. For this reason, he has taken a controversial position on yellowfin tuna fishing, opposing proposals for closed seasons by other members of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the intergovernmental body responsible for regulating tuna fishing in the Indian Ocean. When asked to explain his position, Mr Paubert stated that “all human activities produce impacts on ecosystems; it is impossible to fish without affecting stocks.”

However, some experts hold a different view.

“Yellowfin has been overfished since 2015. It's been in the red area and has just kept getting deeper every year when there's a stock assessment. They said we must reduce by 30%, but instead, catches have increased every year,” says Jess Rattle, Head of Investigations at the British NGO Blue Marine Foundation. “Until last year, when yellowfin magically passed from the red area to the green one without passing through any of the phases in between.”

Gorka Merino, the EU's scientific advisor who led the working group for the new yellowfin stock assessment, justifies this change by stating that “All the stock assessments since 2015 have had technical issues. Now, with the new assessment, we predict that a historical high of 480,000 tonnes would still be sustainable.”

Nevertheless, it is crucial to exercise caution when relying on such data in order to avoid any ecological disaster being caused by scientific imprecisions. Glen Holmes, Senior Officer at the International Fisheries section of the Pew Charitable Trusts, says: “I would treat this stock assessment exactly the same way as the previous ones because there are a lot of complexities in Indian Ocean tuna stocks. This means there are a lot of data gaps that have to be filled somehow. So there's a lot of guesstimation involved. I wouldn't put much faith in the idea that everything is now healthy and fine. I think that would be a really dangerous stance to take!” He adds: “No tuna scientific process is free from political influence; every single one has some level of political influence!”

Glen's statement is not just circumstantial: alongside French companies, Spanish businesses are the most dominant European force at the IOTC. Unsurprisingly, 23 of the 65 vessels included in the EU–Madagascar SFPA belong to major French and Spanish industrial companies with a history of environmentally unfriendly practices. A recent Bloom report shows that one in five of the IOTC's 2,278 delegates represents European interests, despite the EU deploying a smaller number of vessels than other leading IOTC members, such as Indonesia. Up to 2023, when the report was published, 46% of these delegates were industrial lobbyists, which is a worrying figure given that decisions at the IOTC level require a two-thirds majority to pass.

Rather than supporting local development, the EU-Madagascar SFPA ends up functioning as a transfer of public funds into the hands of private European companies. Local fisheries remain underserved, oversight is virtually non-existent and ecological degradation continues unchecked. What is sold as a “sustainable partnership” increasingly looks like a greenwashed cover for industrial exploitation – one that risks the long-term health of the Indian Ocean’s marine ecosystems and the livelihoods of coastal Malagasy communities.

🤝 This investigation is supported by a grant from the Investigative journalism for EU (IJ4EU) fund. The International Press Institute IPI, the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it.