21 September 2026
BLOOM reveals how 80 years of European public policy have led to a catastrophic ocean fail
21 September 2026
As the European Union prepares to vote on its budget for the next seven years, BLOOM, in collaboration with the environmental research consultancy AScA, sets out in a groundbreaking report how 80 years of industrialisation in the fishing sector have led to the sector’s lock-in and a massive ecological, economic and social failure.
Read our report: The Big Ocean Fail
After World War II, the scale of offshore fishing operations changed radically: in less than a century, fishing evolved from a small-scale activity into a productivity-driven industrial enterprise based on the exploitation of marine life, no longer for the purpose of feeding people but for the benefit of a handful of entrepreneurs and investors. Faced with the explosion in the fishing capacity of the European fleet, catches began to plummet as early as 1974. European fisheries were depleting stocks faster than they could recover.
Whilst the sector could have scaled back and re-evaluated its model, political decisions – right up until the latest reform of the Common Fisheries Policy – have instead allowed the race to the bottom to continue. Benefiting from the financial and political support of European Member States, the industry has become a mega-industry: European vessels have become oversized and have ventured to fish further afield, at greater depths and for longer periods, supplying a land-based supply chain created to absorb the volume. Seafood has become ‘marine protein’, assembled, reconstituted and interchangeable: commodities now mainly sold through large-scale retail chains, replacing fish wholesalers and fishmongers.
From deep-sea trawling to electric fishing, the capture industry has adopted the most intrusive and impactful technologies, alongside ever more efficient vessels. Added to this development strategy is the political and economic influence that has enabled the mega-industry to secure key representation within the various fisheries governance bodies. At the other end of the spectrum, small-scale fishing is collapsing.
Far from being content with European waters alone, and aided by fisheries agreements between the European Union and third countries, fleets that have become mega-industrial are expanding beyond European waters, exporting their socio-economic and ecological impacts, and contributing to the overexploitation of global waters and the destabilisation of the socio-economic systems of many countries.
Eighty years at most: that is how long it took a handful of European industrialists and decision-makers to trigger a massive collapse of the oceans: despite the European fleet’s excessive catch capacity, it is now five times harder to catch fish than it was in 1950. Yet fish has become ubiquitous in our meals. “Taxpayers, consumers, citizens, fishers and the marine environment are now paying the ecological, economic and fiscal price for this disproportionate exploitation. We must seize the opportunity presented by the next European budget to put an end, once and for all, to this excess,” urges Léna Fréjaville, fisheries transition manager at BLOOM.