Portugal Hands Out Fishing Quota by Track Record, Crew Numbers and Island Keys, and Is Not Among the Eleven Countries Applying Any Environmental Test

Every year Brussels decides how much fish may be taken from EU waters, and every year each member state decides who among its own fishermen gets to take it. A study published this month for the European Parliament's fisheries committee has gone through how all 22 coastal member states make that second decision, and Portugal comes out of it as a country that hands out quota almost entirely on history, with no environmental test at all.

What Portugal actually uses

The study, Allocation of fishing opportunities in the EU (PE 776.025), was written by Griffin Carpenter for the Policy Department for Regional Development, Agriculture and Fisheries and compiles 237 examples of criteria in use. It records six criteria in the Portuguese system: historical track record, efficiency of usage, local fishing communities, employment, equal access, and vessel capacity. Environmental criteria: none.

The detail is more interesting than the summary. For undulate ray, part of the individual share is calculated from the number of crew members on the vessel. For red seabream (goraz), albacore and bigeye tuna, the historical record is distributed across the Azores by an island key set out in Despacho n.º 2162/2020 and Portaria n.º 79-2025/1. Madeira receives a geofenced slice under Portaria n.º 263/2020, with 85 percent of the national albacore and bigeye tuna quota reserved to the two autonomous regions, and black scabbardfish handled the same way. Sardine is segmented by vessel length, at 9 metres and again at 16 metres, and then shared equally inside each segment. For bluefin tuna and swordfish, the DGRM can pull unused quota back into a national reserve from August or September.

The Europe-wide finding

Article 17 of the Common Fisheries Policy Regulation has, since 2014, required member states to allocate using transparent and objective criteria of an environmental, social and economic nature, and specifically encouraged rewarding selective or lower-impact gear. Twelve years on, the study finds the article has not changed much.

Historical catch records are used by 21 of the 22 coastal states and carry roughly two thirds of the total weighting that governments themselves report. Nineteen states use social or economic criteria and 11 use environmental ones, but where environmental criteria exist they are almost always a binary distinction between passive and active gear rather than a measure of actual performance. No member state allocates on fishing technique or on where the fishing happens. The European Commission has never formally found any national framework non-compliant.

Transparency has the same gap. Seventeen states report high process transparency, yet independent checking found only six publish any register of who ended up with what, and only Estonia maintains one that is both comprehensive and currently online.

What this means for you

• If you buy Portuguese fish. Nothing changes on the counter this week. But allocation rules decide which boats stay viable, and the study's finding is that the current design locks in the fleet Portugal already has.
• If you fish commercially or are thinking about it. Portugal has no newcomer criterion. Entry runs through buying or leasing an existing track record.
• The small-boat numbers. Portugal's small-scale coastal fleet lands 11 percent of the value of quota species here, against an EU average of 4 percent. Quota species make up 39 percent of the total Portuguese fleet's landed value.
• Where this goes next. The committee's next meeting is on 1 September in Brussels, with Portuguese members Paulo Nascimento Cabral, André Franqueira Rodrigues and António Tânger Corrêa sitting on it.

The study's recommendations are deliberately gentle: peer learning between administrations, space to pilot non-binary environmental criteria, and publication of outcomes rather than new obligations. Portugal has form on stock management when it chooses to act, as the quadrupling of the Iberian sardine stock since 2015 and the tightly capped sardine campaign both show. Who gets the fish, though, is still decided by who got it last time.