The European Union’s fisheries fleet receives between €759 million and €1.5 billion in tax breaks each year in the form of fuel tax subsidies, reveals a report published on Monday 20 September by the NGO Our Fish.
The report also shows that the EU fleet produces around 7.3 million tonnes of CO2 “just from burning fuel”.
Entitled ‘Climate Impacts & Fishing Industry Profits From EU Fuel Tax Subsidies’, this paper assesses the fossil fuel tax subsidies received by the EU fisheries fleet as a whole, and presents case studies on the situations in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands.
Our Fish believes that “destructive and fuel-hungry fishing vessels benefit the most from these perverse subsidies, while the climate, fisheries, and small-scale fishers suffer the consequences”.
“While European citizens are expected to pay fuel tax to use their cars, the fishing industry avoids paying between €759 million and over €1.5 billion in taxes each year”, says Rebecca Hubbard, director at Our Fish. However, these tax breaks “only worsen overfishing and jeopardise ocean health”, she adds.
Link to the report: https://bit.ly/3As1rxk (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)