Europe’s fisheries sector is hoping to use a defense pact soon to be under negotiation between the E.U. and U.K. as leverage to improve upon a post-Brexit trade deal made between the two sides and gain greater access to lucrative fishing grounds.
The two sides will meet at a summit on 19 May in London, U.K., to discuss defense and economic cooperation amid global uncertainty. Some E.U. coastal states said they hope the summit will culminate in a deal that codifies fisheries guarantees.
“There are sensitive issues for many E.U. countries, such as fisheries, which need to be addressed,” Jessica Rozencrantz, the minister for European Union affairs of Sweden, said, per the Financial Times. “I would really urge both the E.U. and U.K. to find agreements on these various issues so that we can enter profound defense cooperation.”
The fisheries agreement between the E.U. and Britain was already due to be reviewed in 2026, but renegotiation can’t come soon enough, according to Irish Fish Producers Organization (IFPO) CEO Aodh O’Donnell, who said his members want “a rebalancing of the disproportionate quota transfers that took place in 2020, where we contributed 40 percent of the total value transferred from Europe to the U.K.”
O’Donnell told SeafoodSource the “fundamentally flawed” deal cost IFPO members 26 percent of their mackerel and 15 percent of their nephrops opportunities. He added that the existing agreement failed to account for the stability pillars that underpin the European Common Fisheries Policy.
“This rigid system of determining national quotas, which should ensure fairness and stability, was ignored in the [deal],” he said.
Other European officials have similarly stressed that stability will be key to Europe’s food supply chain moving forward.
Europêche Managing Director Daniel Voces told SeafoodSource in February 2024 that both the European Council and Parliament have recognized that E.U.’s food sovereignty must improve, such as through a deal like the one up for negotiation in May.
“The E.U. cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that external dependency exceeds 70 percent for fisheries and aquaculture products and that there is no focus on regulating the standards of those imports at the same level as E.U. production,” Voces said. “There is good momentum to change the political agenda and structure of the European Commission.”
