Vigo: Galician fleet operators meeting at the port of Vigo this week have begun translating the December 2025 Council deal on 2026 fishing opportunities into operational plans, and the picture is sharply uneven. The political agreement reached at the December Agrifish Council, which set Total Allowable Catches and effort limits for the most important commercial stocks across the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean, delivered some increases for the Iberian fleet but coupled them with significant cuts to the species that anchor mixed demersal fisheries on Spain’s north-west coast.
The headline negative for Vigo is pollack. The Council confirmed a 13% reduction in TACs for the species in the Bay of Biscay, the Cantabrian Sea and Iberian waters, citing scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea that points to continued recruitment weakness. For mixed-fishery vessels that rely on pollack as a high-value bycatch alongside hake and monkfish, a double-digit cut in the choke species threatens to constrain landings of the entire metier under the EU’s landing obligation rules. Whiting in the Bay of Biscay was cut more sharply, by 27%, while sole was reduced by 9% in Iberian waters and by 44% in Skagerrak-Kattegat, a separate metier but one that shapes the bargaining dynamic on the eastern half of the Council table.
On the positive side of the ledger, the agreement included a 60% increase in anchovy TAC in Iberian waters, an 11% increase for megrim, and a 23% rise for Norway lobster in the Cantabrian Sea. The Bay of Biscay saw an 8% increase for anchovy and a striking 49% increase for Norway lobster, the largest single positive move in the package. These increases, taken together, are expected to support the pelagic and crustacean fleets operating out of ports along the Galician and Cantabrian coasts, even as the demersal segment digests the pollack and whiting reductions.
In the western Mediterranean, ministers agreed to maintain the 2025 level of fishing effort for trawlers in Spanish, French and Italian waters, rather than impose the further reductions that the Commission had initially tabled. The decision reflects the political weight of fleets operating out of Sète, Bastia, Mazara del Vallo and the Catalan ports, and the difficulty of reconciling stock recovery objectives with the socio-economic profile of communities that have already absorbed multi-year effort cuts. To mitigate short-term impact and reward more selective gear, ministers extended a slightly adjusted compensation mechanism that rewards vessels using gear with documented selectivity improvements.
Across the Atlantic and Skagerrak-Kattegat zones, the Council reports that 81% of fishing opportunities were set in line with maximum sustainable yield advice, the highest proportion since the Common Fisheries Policy reform of 2013. That headline metric, however, masks the distributional consequence: when sustainability advice translates into a cut for a stock with no immediate substitute, the burden falls on a specific fleet segment rather than being spread across the basin.
The Galician regional government has indicated it will press Madrid for transitional support measures, including temporary tie-up compensation and accelerated processing of European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund applications for selectivity gear retrofits. Without that bridge, Vigo’s mixed-fishery operators warn that the 2026 cuts will translate into measurable reductions in active vessels by the autumn.
