“The day that for some reason we local fishermen disappear, a monopoly of fish from elsewhere will be generated and it will be worth a fortune, people will not be able to afford it,” warns Ivan Perez, president of the Fishermen’s Guild of Formentera, to La Voz de Ibiza.
Perez is in Brussels, where the European Commission’s proposal to reduce by 79% the days allowed for trawling in the Mediterranean Sea territory is being debated. A measure that, warn fishermen from all over Spain (as well as Italy and France) would lead to the disappearance of the sector. And that, in addition, would prevent local supply. “We cannot become dependent on what is fished outside the country. If we manage our fisheries, we can have products for life. We do not have to become dependent on products that come from outside Spain,” says the leader of Formentera, who is, along with other peers, in the Belgian city, participating in negotiations.
Fish and seafood that would increase in price
“Today we compete with the ray that is brought from Argentina and Morocco. If at some point we could not catch skate, they would have a monopoly and prices would go up by how much? I can’t know, these are assumptions,” says Pérez. In addition to the ray, one of the emblematic fish that would lose the huge local quota, Perez points out that there are other seafood products that today come from Balearic coasts but should be brought from abroad if the measure proposed by the European Commission is implemented. Specifically, the products that would become more expensive if the fishing days of local fishermen are restricted would be:
- Stripe
- Shrimp
- Figala
- Moralla
- Squid
- Octopus
“In the end, what I want is to eat fish from our area, and there is plenty of it. In fact, there are plenty of them,” Pérez emphasizes. In the same vein, recently Joan Simonet Pons, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Natural Environment of the Balearic Islands, has pointed out in a letter to Costa Kadis, the new Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans of the European Union, that the reduction of trawling days would mean that there is no “fish on the plate”. In addition, the Balearic leader has pointed out in his letter that the measure proposed by the European Commission would harm not only the fishing industry, but would go against the local culture. As Perez has told La Voz de Ibiza, the fishing boats no longer have room to reduce more days of activity per year (currently they are allowed 130 days a year, but the measure under analysis would reduce this number to 27). “They want to make us disappear,” denounced the leader of the Fishermen’s Guild of Formentera.
