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Early on a warm September morning in southern Italy, Giovanni Nicandro sets out from the port of Taranto in his small boat. Summoning his courage, the mussel farmer inspects his year’s work – only to find them all dead, a sight that almost brings him to tears.
“We have many problems,” he says. “The problems start as soon as we open our eyes in the morning.” The loss is total – not only for Nicandro but also for Taranto’s 400 other mussel farmers, after a combination of pollution and rising sea temperatures devastated their harvest.
In Galicia, a region in north-west Spain on the Atlantic, shellfish pickers such as Rebeca Martínez Romero, who works on foot, are also feeling the heat. Martínez was unable to work for 10 months after unusually high water temperatures and intense rainfall killed about 95% of cockles and 75% of clams in December 2023.
Heatwaves, which can be fatal to sensitive bivalves, have become frequent and are projected to triple by 2040, threatening centuries-old traditions of small-scale aquaculture in southern Europe.
“Shellfish-picking is truly wonderful work. I wouldn’t want it to end, but we don’t see much effort being made to support us,” says Martínez.
Yet there is money in the pot. The EU has allocated more than €12bn (£10bn) to member states through the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund (EMFAF), which runs from 2021 to 2027, and its predecessor, the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF), from 2014 to 2020. The funds aim to support sustainable fisheries, strengthen coastal communities and protect marine biodiversity.
However, the Guardian has discovered that only a small fraction of the money has reached small-scale producers such as Nicandro and Martínez, because, they claim, the system to apply for the money is set up in a way that is difficult for them to understand and access.
From 2014 to 2021, only 20% of EMFF funds supported small-scale fishing while the lion’s share went to large-scale fleets, according to the environmental law charity ClientEarth. “For the last 20 years, we have seen that they [EU member states] favour large-scale industry; they have done nothing to facilitate the access of small-scale fishers,” says Flaminia Tacconi, a lawyer working for the environmental organisation Bloom.
Spain is the biggest recipient of EMFAF funds, receiving €1.12bn, of which Galicia received the highest share of any region, almost 32%, during the previous iteration of the fund. Meanwhile, Italy received €518m, with about €90m of EMFF funds allocated to the Puglia region, home to Taranto.
But despite the clear mandate to improve the resilience of small-scale fishers, none of the Galician or Italian producers interviewed by the Guardian received EMFF or EMFAF funds because of the difficulty of applying for it.
Sandra Amézaga, spokesperson of Mulleres Salgadas, a Galician association of women in the fisheries sector, says: “There’s a clear interest in changing the fishing model in Galicia, moving towards exploitation by private companies … and a lack of adequate social measures to protect people engaged in traditional fishing.”
The region’s powerful fishing industry has received millions of EMFAF funds to expand processing and production. Conservas Cerqueira, one of the region’s largest producers of canned seafood, received €8.4m – the single largest amount awarded in Spain – to construct a new factory, according to data published by the Spanish agriculture ministry.
Another Galician company in the fishing sector, Hermanos Fernández Ibáñez Consignatarios de Pesca, with annual revenue of more than €107m, was awarded €3.8m to build a new processing plant and cold-storage unit.
Even the Galician regional government’s own maritime and fisheries department, Consellería do Mar, was given more than €5.4m to attend international conferences to promote local seafood in 2024 and this year, including in Cape Verde, Singapore and Boston.
While attending conferences falls under one of the EMFF’s goals of marketing “fishery and aquaculture products”, Amézaga argues that the government should prioritise ensuring there is a product to promote in the first place. The Galician regional government did not reply to a request for comment.
In Italy, some recipients received up to €10,000 for engine upgrades and up to €20,000 to buy new boats. While the first is allowed in special cases, the second is considered ineligible, according to EU regulations. The Italian agriculture ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Shellfish producers the Guardian spoke to who could access funding for purposes such as boat and machinery upgrades were part of larger groups, such as the influential mussel-producing organisations that wield significant power in Galicia.
By contrast, independent shellfish pickers and mussel farmers approached by the Guardian in Galicia and Taranto described trying to make applications but finding the process “overly complex” and “unclear”. The Spanish agriculture and fisheries ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The organisation Low Impact Fishers of Europe also confirmed that funding is generally more easily accessible for larger entities. “Funds tend to get captured by structures recognised and favoured by national governments … where small scale fishers may be a marginalised minority,” said a spokesperson.
Laurène Provost, who leads fair competition and public support at ClientEarth, says: “[Funding opportunities] should be tailored to the needs of small-scale fishers who lack initial capital and technical expertise.”
The European Commission’s response was that the responsibility for the fair distribution of the money belongs to individual governments. “We continuously call on member states to provide dedicated support [to small-scale fishers], simplify application procedures and reduce administrative requirements,” it said.
Ten years ago there were about 900 shellfish pickers on Galicia’s Illa de Arousa; today, only 180 remain. One, 55-year-old Inmaculada Rodríguez, is calling on the regional government to fund a study to understand how the climate crisis and other environmental factors such as pollution are affecting shellfish populations.
“They have to identify the problem, to figure out what’s happening to the ocean and the shellfish, and why so much of it is dying,” she says.
Meanwhile, the effects of the climate emergency are already devastating the livelihoods of Taranto mussel farmers, such as Adriano Lippo. “We live in a state of calamity, and we’re asking for this to be recognised,” he says.
“We are already enduring the humiliation of barely scraping together a few coins to put a small meal on the table for our children.”
Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe
