The image shows the location of Tenerife (red) in the Canary Islands

Fishing Failure in the Canary Islands: Artisanal Fleet Catches Only 20% of Bluefin Tuna Quota in 2025

SPAIN
Tuesday, October 07, 2025, 00:10 (GMT + 9)

Poor management and a lack of interannual flexibility condemn fishermen to squander internationally valued fishing rights.

Santa Cruz de Tenerife — The artisanal fishing fleet in the Canary Islands is closing yet another season with disastrous results in the capture of bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), known locally as patudo. In 2025, the nearly 200 island vessels that use the pole-and-line and live bait method have only managed to land about 115 tonnes out of the 568 tonnes allocated, representing a mere 20% of the total authorized quota. This failure, which has been repeated for the third consecutive year (2023, 2024, and 2025), highlights serious deficiencies in the system for managing and allocating fishing rights in the archipelago.

Since the start of the second phase of the season on May 30, landings totaled just 110 tonnes, with a paltry addition of only five tonnes since then.

The Fight for Flexibility

The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, and Food Sovereignty of the Canary Islands Government has acknowledged the "disaster" and is pointing directly to the need to reform the state regulations governing the fishery. Minister Narvay Quintero and his team (Deputy Minister Eduardo García and Director General of Fisheries, Esteban Reyes) have been pressuring the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA) for years to urgently modify Royal Decree 46/2019.

Their primary demand is interannual flexibility, which would allow unconsumed quota remnants to be carried over to the following year. This would help the fleet adapt to the fluctuations in the bluefin tuna's migratory cycle through the Canary Islands fishing grounds. This solution has been systematically denied or ignored by MAPA, and it's estimated that, even if approved, it wouldn't be effective until 2027.

The quota allocated to the Canary Islands for 2025 was 568 tonnes, a volume slightly higher than in 2023 and 2024 (538 tonnes) thanks to an additional 30 tonnes transferred from Iceland to the European Union. Despite this, the poor catch figures undermine the Ministry's repeated requests for a quota increase, as the archipelago fails to use even the 7.9% of the national total it's already assigned.

Sector Changes and Controversy Ahead

In a meeting with the provincial federations of fishermen's guilds in the Canary Islands last September, the Ministry announced major changes for 2026 and beyond:

• Change in Allocation System: There are plans to move from the current, inefficient system to a limited Olympic fishing model. This would allow artisanal vessels to fish without a pre-set individual limit per boat.

• Quota Transferability: The government will explore regulatory modifications to allow unconsumed local quota to be transferred or sold to other fishing or aquaculture operators, potentially even with transfers of rights from the Canary Islands to the rest of Spain. This could open the door to selling rights to tuna fattening farms, a common practice in the Mediterranean.

• Census Cleanup: Immediate action will be taken to clean up the bluefin tuna fishing register, removing vessels that have gone more than three years without catches or more than two years without fishing trips. This is intended to reactivate quotas currently assigned to boats that don't use them and can't legally transfer them.

However, the meeting drew criticism from the pole-and-line tuna fleet, which feels unrepresented by the federations and regretted not being invited to the summit to address their "dramatic crisis."

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