The shock doctrine: how the industrial fishing lobby puts the Iran war to work

28 May 2026

Against the backdrop of the Iran war, when the International Monetary Fund warns against broad, untargeted relief, the EU Commission and Member States, while talking at great length about transition, resilience, and decarbonisation, are giving in to the industrial fishing lobby which is deploying a successful “shock doctrine” strategy in Brussels.   

While the evaluation of the Common Fisheries Policy stresses the importance of proper implementation and highlights failures in addressing the overcapacity of the EU fishing fleet, the European Commission is busy channelling hundreds of millions of euros in emergency public money towards the most fuel-dependent, energy intensive and environmentally destructive fishing vessels.   

On the 8th May, the European Union gave birth to a new “fuel monster”: the 112-metre-trawler “Annie Hillina”. This gigantic fishing vessel, wider than a six-lane motorway, is capable of catching and processing 400 tonnes of fish in a single day: this is as much as what a small-scale fisher will catch in an entire lifetime.  

This industrial monster trawler will consume up to 12 million litres of fuel per year, to target Atlantic mackerel, blue whiting and horse mackerel: three fish stocks that are respectively collapsing, overfished, and in crisis. 

Parlevliet & van der Plas, better known as “P&P”, which launched this new vessel of mass destruction, is one of Europe’s most powerful fishing groups, part of “The Big Five” Dutch companies that reign over the fishing sector in the EU.  

If P&P was able to pursue its gigantism strategy and build this new mega trawler, it is because public authorities support it. Governments speak of transition, resilience, decarbonisation. They also issue the permits. The words travel one way; the vessels travel another. 

Here is the story about the widening gap between the European institutions’ policy discourse, marked by gravity and a call for responsibility and decisive action, and the decisions taken in Brussels which actively fuel the crisis it purports to evade. 

The shock doctrine at work

A few weeks before the christening, oil prices were already rising as a consequence of the war in Iran, and fishing industry lobbies were already on the phones. The playbook is familiar: fuel goes up, the sector raises the alarm, emergency relief follows, the structural picture stays the same. As Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine argues: wrenching crises are exploited “to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite”. It happened in 2004. In 2008. In 2022.  

Now it is happening again. 

On the 16th of April, the European Commission activated the crisis mechanism of the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund (EMFAF), opening around €760 million in emergency relief retroactive to 28 February, covering fishers, processors and retailers affected by the Middle East conflict. In its own announcement, the Commission named the underlying problem: the sector’s “structural vulnerability” to fossil fuel dependence. Then it released the money anyway, with a temporary framework for further support still in preparation. 

France moved faster. On the 27th of March, the government announced a 20 cent per liter fuel subsidy for fishing vessels, costing an estimated €5 million for April alone. The trawl lobby immediately demanded 40 cents, “to save the sector.” The National Fisheries Committee framed the gap as an emergency. This situation highlights a reality that goes far beyond the current incident: industrial fishing, the most destructive form of fishing there is, cannot survive without public funds. Under any circumstances. 

The burden is not spread evenly across the fleet. According to BLOOM and The Shift Project’s carbon footprint assessment of French fisheries, bottom trawlers represent just 11% of the French fleet but account for nearly half of its CO₂ emissions. The fleets demanding the most relief are precisely those most locked into the fuel-dependent model, and those doing the greatest damage to the conditions that make life habitable. Emergency money flows toward the problem rather than away from it. 

 An abject failure to meet objectives

The Commission’s own mid-term evaluation of the EMFAF makes uncomfortable reading. By the end of 2024, the fund had reached only 24.6% of its planned output milestones. Specifically, for the objectives that matter most: data collection and control reached only 8.7%, biodiversity and ecosystems 20.8%, and energy efficiency and CO₂ reduction and paltry 11%. 

Emergency relief can be mobilised in days. Yet the work meant to prevent or mitigate the existential emergencies already reshaping the sector, climate change, biodiversity loss, the collapse of marine ecosystems and the erosion of coastal livelihoods, has been running for years but is barely off the starting line. 

The IMF made the same observation in its April outlook for Europe, warning against broad, untargeted relief and calling instead for temporary, targeted support paired with reforms that actually reduce energy vulnerability over time. European fisheries policy is moving in the opposite direction. 

A crisis being put to work 

BLOOM has highlighted  how the current fuel shock is being shaped into something beyond a relief package. Under the language of emergency, dressed in the vocabulary of decarbonisation, simplification and competitiveness, industrial fishing lobbies are pushing to reopen the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), loosen fleet capacity rules, expand public support for new vessels, and revive electric fishing, a destructive technique the EU banned in 2021 after years of campaigning by BLOOM and small-scale fishers. A crisis caused by fossil fuel dependence is being turned into an argument for subsidising the fleets most dependent on fossil fuel. 

The Commission’s CFP evaluation, published on 30 April, points clearly in the other direction. The legal framework is not the problem. Implementation is. Member States could decide to allocate fishing opportunities using environmental and social criteria, but most Member States decided to ignore this avenue to the benefit of business as usual. The tools needed to end overfishing and support low-impact fisheries exist. What is missing is the political will and good sense to use them. 

Reopening the CFP under industrial lobby pressure would direct years of negotiation toward dismantling safeguards rather than applying them. The current crisis should be accelerating implementation, not being used as a pretext to undo it.

Budget choices, compounded

The pressure is now shifting into the next EU budget cycle. The proposed Budget Expenditure Tracking and Performance Regulation was designed to measure what EU spending actually delivers, including on climate, biodiversity, and the “do no significant harm” principle. The PECH committee’s draft opinion proposes exempting agriculture and fisheries from this framework entirely. In the sector that most needs accountability, at precisely the moment it is absorbing large volumes of emergency public money, the proposed response is less scrutiny. 

At the WTO, the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies entered into force in September 2025, banning support for illegal fishing, overfished stocks, and unregulated high-seas effort. But the harder part of the negotiation, tackling the subsidies that build overcapacity and keep harmful fleets profitable, remains unfinished. Fuel relief, tax advantages, operating cost support: all of it still determines which fleets remainviable and how much pressure falls on already depleted stocks. The EU should enter the Fish 2 negotiations prepared to put all of that on the table, including indirect fossil fuel subsidies and the full range of capacity-enhancing support. 

What a real response would look like 

None of this means fishers should be left to absorb a fuel shock alone. Crews and coastal communities feel these shocks quickly, in a sector already weakened by falling catches, degraded ecosystems and years of poor planning. But support shouldn’t continue to prop up operators whose business model depends on subsidies, cheap fuel and the destruction of the very conditions on which fishing depends. 

Genuine support is different: wage guarantees for those forced to stay in port, public investment to replace trawls with pots, lines and gillnets, quota allocation reoriented toward small-scale fishers that can operate with lower fuel dependence, and a transition plan with actual milestones. Helping fishers through a fuel shock should mean helping them escape fuel dependence, not tying them more tightly to it. Each euro spent should move the sector toward lower impact fishing, restored fish populations, decent livelihoods and a sea that can still sustain life. 

The Annie Hillina will fish mackerel, blue whiting and horse mackerel, stocks already under severe pressure, with permits already in hand, from a vessel commissioned and built while Europe was still describing itself as committed to transition. 

The next EU budget will face the same decision at greater scale: keep absorbing the costs of a fuel-dependent model each time it is stressed or begin funding the conditions for something different. Cheaper fuel for the same vessels and the same practices, repeated across budget cycles, is not a transition. It is more of the unsustainable same, funded with public money. 

Further reading

• The BLOOM petition calling for a ban on vessels over 25 meters within 12 miles and the decommissioning of factory ships has gathered over 80,000 signatures.