Brussels has a problem of geographical myopia. Its new fishing control regulation is the perfect example of how a rule designed in an air-conditioned office in Belgium can destroy the livelihood of a family in La Restinga. By requiring geolocation and electronic logs for boats that barely exceed a few meters in length, the European Union is not protecting the sea; it is expelling from it those who have cared for it for centuries: artisanal fishermen.
The protest on the Herreño dock is not a nostalgic whim; it is a cry for survival. For a fisherman who goes out each day to take a risk in the Atlantic, being required to be an expert in real-time monitoring software is an insurmountable barrier to entry. It is the ‘satellite bureaucracy‘ applied to those who fish one by one, respecting the cycles of nature and maintaining the food sovereignty of the youngest island in the Canary Islands.
What is most outrageous is the hypocrisy of the system. While the EU talks a lot about sustainability and support for Outermost Regions (RUP), it imposes the same rules on an industrial giant as it does on a fisherman from El Hierro. It is a poorly understood equality that punishes the small. Monitoring an artisan by GPS is like putting a tachograph on a bicycle: an absurd, costly, and profoundly unjust measure that only serves to inflate Brussels’ control statistics.
From a social policy perspective, this regulation is an accelerant for the emptied Canary Islands. If the primary sector dies from regulatory suffocation, the coastal towns of El Hierro will become theme parks for tourists where no one will remain who knows how to cast a fishing line. The Government of the Canary Islands and the State cannot simply ‘lament’ the regulation; they must demand real exceptions due to our RUP status. We are not the North Sea, and our small boats are not floating factories.
In short, the ‘modernization‘ that Europe sells sounds like a requiem at the Canary docks. If this technological madness is not stopped, traditional fishing will become a picture in a tourism brochure, while the plates in our restaurants fill with imported frozen fish. Brussels should remember that the integrity of the sea is defended with fishermen, not against them.
News written by Pedro Marrero. Edited and verified by Gara Vega H. Cross-referenced information without institutional filters. This analysis has not been financed by official advertising or conditioned by lobby interests.
