The sea does not recognize the neat geometries of political maps. It moves through currents rather than borders, carries fish across jurisdictions, alters its temperature without consulting governments, deposits sargassum against one island while withdrawing migratory species from another, and binds together communities separated by thousands of miles of water. For Europe’s Outermost Regions, this is not an abstraction. The ocean is geography and livelihood, inheritance and uncertainty, pantry and workplace, an immense blue territory upon which generations have constructed economies, cultures, and ways of understanding the world. Yet the policies designed in Europe’s continental centers do not always possess the same intimacy with distance. That tension—between the universal language of regulation and the stubborn particularity of place—runs throughout a wide-ranging conversation with Daniela Costa, Secretary-General of the Advisory Council for the Outermost Regions, who argues that despite important progress, “the specific characteristics of the Outermost Regions are still not sufficiently taken into account in the Common Fisheries Policy.” Her words open onto a much larger question than fisheries alone: how can a European policy become truly European if it does not adequately recognize the extraordinary diversity of the territories over which it governs?
To speak of the Outermost Regions is already to dismantle the idea that Europe ends at the European continent. Its political and cultural geography stretches outward into the Atlantic, the Caribbean, South America, and the Indian Ocean, into territories whose relationship with the sea is not peripheral but existential. And there can therefore be no single story of fisheries across these regions. Daniela Costa insists upon this almost immediately. The challenges differ from territory to territory, even while two enormous forces—global overfishing, particularly illegal and undeclared fishing, and climate change—cross nearly all of them. Saint-Martin remains comparatively little known to the Council, having joined relatively recently. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, the sea still bears the consequences of chlordecone, the agricultural insecticide used for years in banana plantations whose contamination of soil and coastal waters continues to impose restrictions upon fishing. Those islands also confront severe invasions of sargassum, sometimes accumulating so extensively that fishermen cannot even leave harbor. Here environmental history becomes economic history: a chemical used on land decades ago continues to shape what may be taken from the sea today, while an expanding biological phenomenon can transform the harbor—the place designed to provide access to the ocean—into an obstacle to it.
Elsewhere, the difficulties become still more dramatic. French Guiana, the only continental territory among the Outermost Regions, faces what Costa describes as probably the most serious illegal-fishing problem anywhere in the European Union. Vessels from third countries enter its waters illegally, and the confrontations may involve violence, weapons, and episodes resembling piracy. Mayotte, meanwhile, presents an almost unbearable convergence of environmental and social vulnerability: poverty, inadequate sanitation, an aging fishing fleet, poor working conditions aboard vessels, insufficient port infrastructure, and the deterioration of the European Union’s largest coral barrier. The absence of adequate sanitation is not merely a social deficiency confined to the land; it reaches the reef, compromises habitat, and eventually returns to human communities through diminished marine resources. In La Réunion, where the ocean becomes extraordinarily deep close to shore, fishermen depend upon fixed fish-aggregating devices to gain access to resources, yet financing for those devices remains a central problem. In each place, the vocabulary changes, but the underlying lesson does not: there can be no sustainable ocean without sustainable communities along its shores.
The Atlantic islands offer their own variations upon this geography of fragility. Madeira struggles with an aging fleet—according to the Council’s study, among the oldest in the Outermost Regions—and insufficient tuna quotas in an economy where tuna and black scabbardfish remain especially important. The Canary Islands confront another imbalance: recreational fishing licenses vastly outnumber professional ones, creating conditions in which undeclared fish can enter the market at lower prices and undermine those whose livelihood depends upon professional fishing. Aquaculture, important to the Canaries, introduces additional questions about maritime space and environmental effects. In both Madeira and the Azores, meanwhile, the establishment of Marine Protected Areas has generated unease among fishing communities that fear the loss of grounds used for generations. Costa notes that in Madeira there have even been reports of professionals learning about certain decisions through the media—a detail that says something fundamental about the difference between protecting a territory for a community and attempting to protect it without adequately speaking with that community.
The Azorean case is particularly revealing because it refuses the simplicity of a narrative in which conservation and fishing must always stand on opposite shores. Costa notes that quotas for some of the archipelago’s most valuable demersal and benthic species have been recognized as well managed, with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea recommending increases for certain species, including red seabream and splendid alfonsino. At the same time, fishermen consider tuna quotas far too limited, while Marine Protected Areas continue to raise serious concerns about the disappearance of traditional fishing grounds. These apparently contradictory realities contain one of the interview’s essential arguments: sustainability cannot be manufactured through slogans. It must be built species by species, region by region, with science, observation, regulation, economic knowledge, and the accumulated experience of those who actually go to sea.
This is precisely where the Advisory Council for the Outermost Regions occupies an unusually important space. Its work remains largely invisible to the wider public, yet Costa describes an institution whose purpose is to carry the lived realities of fishermen, aquaculture operators, environmental organizations, and other stakeholders into European decision-making. This year alone, the Council expects to exceed twelve recommendations addressed to the European Commission and the relevant Member States—Portugal, Spain, and France. Its recommendations seek consensus, but disagreement is not erased when consensus proves impossible: minority positions are recorded, transmitted, and made public. Its work, including its finances, is public and transparent. This matters because democracy at the European scale can easily become an architecture of distance. The farther a fishing vessel is from Brussels, the more necessary the mechanisms capable of ensuring that the fisherman’s knowledge does not disappear somewhere between the harbor and the institution.
Costa is careful not to portray the European Commission as indifferent. Quite the contrary. She describes a relationship marked by attention, engagement, and an increasing willingness to understand the Outermost Regions. Commission representatives regularly attend the Council’s meetings and have repeatedly traveled to the regions themselves. She recalls with particular pride the Council’s first meeting, held in Praia da Vitória, on Terceira Island, which was attended by seven representatives of the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, including its Director-General. There have also been concrete results: increases in quotas for certain Azorean demersal species and, more recently, a commitment by European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans Costas Kadis to seek compensation mechanisms for Azorean fishermen affected by the implementation of Marine Protected Areas. Perhaps even more significant institutionally is the Commission’s decision to launch two separate strategic consultations on the future of fisheries—one addressing coastal areas generally and another devoted specifically to the Outermost Regions. The distinction acknowledges something that these islands and territories have long argued: difference is not a request for privilege; sometimes it is simply a demand for accuracy.
And accuracy is precisely what Costa believes the Common Fisheries Policy still lacks when applied to the RUP. The Council’s Recommendation No. 63 proposes, among other measures, a specific chapter devoted to the Outermost Regions within the Common Fisheries Policy; regionally appropriate assessments of the relationship between fleet capacity and fishing opportunities; deeper socioeconomic studies; adapted criteria for collecting and analyzing data; and specific criteria governing the allocation of fishing opportunities. Behind these technical proposals lies an unmistakably human reality. Approximately 95 percent of fishing activity in the Outermost Regions is carried out by small vessels. This is not primarily the industrial imagery so often associated with debates about global fisheries. It is small-scale fishing: men and women, families and associations, local harbors and modest boats, economies in which a regulatory decision taken far away may enter directly into the monthly calculations of a household.
This is why the supposed opposition between conservation and economic survival is ultimately inadequate. Costa refuses it. Marine conservation and the viability of fishing communities, she argues, “should not be regarded as incompatible objectives.” Both require policies adapted to the Outermost Regions, grounded in scientific knowledge, local realities, and direct participation by professionals. The Council therefore advocates stronger action against illegal and undeclared fishing, revised tuna quotas, greater support for small-scale fishing associations, better port infrastructure and sanitation where these remain inadequate, and more scientific research specifically directed toward the Outermost Regions rather than dependence upon generalized studies. Particularly compelling is the proposal to give fishing associations sufficient resources to employ specialized professionals, including biologists. It imagines the harbor not as the opposite of the laboratory, but as one of the places where knowledge and experience might finally meet.
That encounter becomes increasingly urgent under climate change. The warming sea is already rewriting an ancient geography. Large pelagic species are altering migratory routes; some tunas are appearing at higher latitudes where they were once uncommon. A line on a fisheries map may remain exactly where it was drawn while the fish upon which that line’s economic meaning depends simply swim elsewhere. Demersal species are vulnerable in another way: each requires particular temperature ranges for reproduction and development, and altered water temperatures can reduce reproductive success and ultimately undermine stock renewal. Costa points to groupers as one example in which such effects have already been identified. Invasive species are becoming more visible; sargassum is increasingly present across parts of the Atlantic; storms and hurricanes are growing more damaging to ports and fishing infrastructure; increased rainfall can carry contaminants from land into coastal waters. Climate change, in this sense, is not one problem among many. It is a force capable of rearranging all the others.
And yet one of the most intellectually interesting passages in Costa’s interview concerns knowledge itself: Who knows the sea?
Science does, certainly. But not science alone.
European fisheries policy, as Costa describes it, emerges ideally from a conversation among three forms of knowledge. Member States provide the political dimension. Scientific councils and institutions provide formal scientific evidence. Advisory Councils contribute what might be called the knowledge of lived experience—the observations accumulated by people who encounter the ocean not periodically through a research project but continually through work. One form cannot simply replace another. A fisherman’s observation is not automatically a scientific stock assessment, just as incomplete scientific data should not automatically render decades of professional observation meaningless. Costa offers the example of splendid alfonsino: insufficient scientific data might produce a recommendation to reduce quotas even while Azorean fishermen continue to observe considerable abundance at sea. The fishermen cannot, by themselves, scientifically establish the condition of the stock. But their observations may reveal that the problem lies not in the absence of fish, but in the absence of sufficient contemporary data.
That distinction is crucial.
The Council therefore invites researchers and specialists to its meetings, allowing scientific findings to enter into conversation with the accumulated knowledge of fishing communities. Sometimes, Costa observes, there is a mutual validation between what fishermen have been seeing and what scientific investigation demonstrates. The Council does not pretend to replace science, nor does the Commission ask it to do so. Its purpose is different and perhaps equally necessary: to ensure that the human experience of the sea is present when scientific evidence becomes political decision.
There is something almost ancient in that encounter. Long before satellites measured ocean temperatures and international organizations calculated stock abundance, fishermen read currents, winds, seasons, birds, water, and the movement of species. Modern science has given us forms of knowledge those generations could never possess, and without rigorous science no credible twenty-first-century fisheries policy can exist. But wisdom rarely advances by replacing one way of knowing with another. It advances when knowledge learns to listen across disciplines and experiences.
For the Outermost Regions, that listening carries particular urgency because remoteness has always produced a paradox. These territories may appear peripheral when viewed from continental Europe, yet many stand at the center of some of the most consequential questions facing Europe’s future: oceans, biodiversity, climate change, maritime sovereignty, food security, renewable resources, and the sustainable use of enormous marine territories. The Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin, French Guiana, Mayotte, and La Réunion are not merely distant points on the European map. They are places where the future of the ocean is already arriving.
Daniela Costa’s interview ultimately asks Europe to understand geography not as distance from a center, but as difference deserving intelligence. A regulation that treats unlike realities identically may achieve administrative uniformity while producing practical inequality. The challenge for the Common Fisheries Policy is therefore not simply to create rules for Europe’s seas. It is to acquire enough imagination—and enough humility—to understand the many seas contained within Europe.
For island communities, the question is older still. The fisherman leaves harbor because the sea gives life, but returns because life must continue on land. Between those two movements lies an entire civilization: boats and families, markets and memories, science and weather, legislation and inheritance, fear and knowledge, conservation and necessity.
The ocean must be protected because without it there can be no fishing communities.
But the communities must also endure, because without the people who have lived beside, worked upon, and learned from the sea across generations, we risk preserving the ocean while losing part of its human memory.
And sustainability, if it is to mean anything worthy of the word, must find room for both.
Based on an interview conducted by José Henrique Andrade for Correio dos Açores- Natalino Viveiros, director. Photos from DA.