Bound to Sea but Buried in Debt, Spain’s Fishermen Blame Bloc’s Policies

Since then, they have run into problems: declining fish stocks, tighter quotas on catches, rising operating costs and a sharp economic downturn that has slashed both fish prices and demand.

The impact has devastated much of Spain’s coastal economy. It has also generated intensifying criticism of European Union policies that, environmental groups and experts say, have increased fishing communities’ dependency on subsidies to make up for the decline in both revenues and fish populations, even as the bloc continues to pay generous subsidies to scrap older vessels to upgrade Europe’s fleet. The new boats are typically bigger and more powerful, adding pressure on declining fish populations.

Coastal regions, they warn, are in the grip of a vicious downward spiral, with steep economic and environmental costs that they are urging leaders to halt.

“Spain has been one of the worst examples of using public money to modernize and increase the capacity of the fleet,” said Saskia Richartz of Greenpeace in Brussels, the group’s European Union oceans policy director. “We have now reached a crisis point, with a generation of fishermen whose boats are owned by banks and who have no fish to catch.”

In coastal areas like Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a town in the south near Cádiz, as fishermen struggle to repay the mortgages on their vessels, many say they resent that bloc policies distorted their financial incentives and then left them high and dry once Spain’s economic crisis hit.

The European Union stopped directly financing boat purchases in 2005 to curtail the size of Europe’s fleet, but for many here the damage was already done. José Antonio Díaz León, the president of the fish market of Sanlúcar, home to about 100 fishing boats, estimated that “95 percent of the owners here have a mortgage on their boat, which many simply can no longer afford.”

Among Sanlúcar’s disillusioned is José Odero, who bought a new boat worth almost $650,000, with twice the tonnage of his previous vessel. Although the world financial crisis was already under way at the time, Mr. Odero said he had no difficulty securing a bank mortgage and had felt confident that the investment would translate into higher revenue. He declined to say whether he received a European Union subsidy.

The investment was “a massive mistake,” Mr. Odero said, as quota restrictions, falling fish prices and rising fuel costs left his income stagnant. This year Mr. Odero was forced to ask his bank to delay his mortgage payments of about $1,025 a month.

“I’ve been given a bit more time, but I’m slowly drowning in financial problems,” Mr. Odero added. “I would love to sell my boat now, but there’s nobody willing to pay decent money for it.”

His story is repeated in places like the northwestern city of Vigo, Spain’s biggest fishing port, where fishing helps sustain about 60,000 of its 300,000 residents, according to local officials.

Claudio Fernández Ibañez, chief executive of Hermanos Fernandez Ibañez, a fish brokerage house in Vigo, said many fishermen had no choice but to scale back or shut down. “Those who have not managed to amortize fully their boat purchase costs before the crisis are now really suffering, trying to sell unaffordable boats for which there is really no demand,” he said.

Given the economic crisis, he said, Spanish consumers are downgrading to cheaper and largely imported fish, with prices for products like swordfish dropping 40 percent this year. “The E.U. is putting all the focus on the environmental impact of fishing and ignoring completely our economic problems,” he said.