The European Union has held a dominant position among Indian Ocean tuna fleets since the 1980s, despite the ocean’s distance from Europe. At times, vessels flying Spanish or French flags accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the catch of the region’s three key tropical tuna species: skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye.
As more coastal states began to exert their right to exploit this natural resource on their doorstep in the 1990s, the percentage of catch caught by EU-flagged vessels began to slip, and in the 2020s it sits between 16-21 per cent.
