The Spanish tuna fleet, gathered in the Organization of Associated Producers of Large Freezer Tuna Vessels (OPAGAC), will take up, next November 24, the celebration of its National Tuna Congress which, this year, reaches its fifth edition.

Since the previous edition of this biennial event, held in 2018, the fleet has scored milestones, as relevance for the global fisheries sector, certification of the integral sustainability of its activity, based on its conviction to safeguard the ecosystem and fishery resources to continue favoring its sustainability and the socioeconomic growth of the coastal countries.

These milestones will be the main topic of the program of presentations at this fifth meeting by renowned national and international experts who will address the environmental, socioeconomic, commercial, regulatory, technological, nutritional and consumption criteria that currently define the world tropical tuna fishery and distinguish the Spanish fleet in a globalized market.

As a global market, this market is also highly competitive and, in the same way consumers do not all take into account the same factors when choosing one product or another, not all fleets play by the same rules in favor of their profitability as the only criteria.

The meeting will start with three presentations that will address each of the aspects of this integral sustainability: environmental, social and economic; all of them materialized in the two labels obtained by the Spanish fleet in an internationally pioneering way.

First, in 2019, Spanish consumers became the first ones to obtain cans with the Responsible Fishing Tuna certification in the market. Secondly, and more recently, last July, the fleet culminated its work to guarantee tropical tuna with a responsible and sustainable origin, both environmentally and socially, with the achievement of the MSC label for half of its catches, 180,000 tons and 3% of world production, in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Regarding economic sustainability, this event will analyze a traditional demand of the tuna fleet: the revision of the EU criteria for imports of fishery products from fleets that do not meet the quality standards of EU fisheries. A case of unfair competition aggravated in the case of tuna, one of the most consumed fish by Europeans, to become free of duties, through the so-called tariff quotas.