The final tally of fishing operations in the occupied waters of the Malvina Islands completely shattered the narrative of prosperity that the Vigo shipowners and the colonial administration tried to maintain until the very last minute. With the 16 large freezer trawlers already moored at the Beiramar docks , the Galician press—through reports from Moncloa and Atlántico —had to present the stark reality: the fleet closes the 2026 fishing season with a total of barely 47,000 tons of Patagonian squid ( Loligo gahi ), practically half of what was obtained in years of typical productivity for the fishing grounds .

The debacle was sealed by a second season that bordered on total inactivity . After yielding 42,000 tons in the opening season, the second harvest of the year plummeted to a meager 5,000 tons before British authorities decreed a premature closure due to the absolute lack of marketable biomass. This production collapse is not an isolated seasonal setback: it confirms an uninterrupted series of forced closures, failed harvests, and biological rest periods that expose the depletion of the resource under the illegal licensing system.

Paying US$48 million for fishing for nothing

Behind the collapse in catches lies a financial crisis of enormous proportions for Galician companies. The exploitation scheme agreed upon in 2022 for a period of 25 years—valid until 2047—was sold to the sector as a guarantee of long-term legal stability that incentivized the construction of colossal vessels, with investments reaching up to 50 million euros per unit.

However, that same contract now contains a leonine clause: the Spanish-island joint ventures are obliged to pay more than 36 million pounds sterling annually to the colonial government of occupation (about 48 million dollars), regardless of whether the ships are fishing or condemned to mooring due to a biological ban .

The financial situation described by the Vigo media is suffocating:

The climate excuse for predation

Cornered by the financial results, the shipping companies are trying to shift the focus of the discussion by attributing the disaster exclusively to "bioclimatic factors," the impact of climate change in subpolar regions, and the alterations in temperatures and ocean currents resulting from the El Niño phenomenon. Appealing to the slogan that "science is the only solution," they seek to buy institutional time and avoid any questioning of the extractive model.

What companies and the trade press fail to mention is that biomass doesn't disappear by magic: it's the result of decades of excessive overexploitation using increasingly powerful fishing vessels with larger holds and highly damaging bottom trawling gear. The so-called "sustainable management" by the UK has proven to be a bureaucratic fiction designed to collect royalties at the expense of the integrity of the Southwest Atlantic marine ecosystem.

The political divide between Vigo, Madrid and the colonial enclave

The crisis extends beyond the fishing port and has escalated into a political problem in Spain. Deep-sea fishing is a key pillar of the Galician economy, with significant influence in the Galician Parliament and the Galician Ministry of the Sea. With the Malvina Islands fishing grounds in a critical zone, business discontent is putting pressure on Madrid and Brussels to obtain protections or indirect subsidies to offset the shortfall in the southern fishing grounds.

This scenario raises a question that worries the shipowners themselves: if the second campaign of the year has become structurally unviable, how much longer can they sustain the fixed cost of a multimillion-dollar fee tied to a fishing ground that is no longer profitable?

Alongside the legal battles in Tierra del Fuego over collective environmental damage and the warnings of sanctions against the corporate network, the very equation of costs and catches is dealing a devastating blow to the enclave's financing. When plunder ceases to be profitable for the shipowners who foot the bill, the British military and administrative occupation of the Malvina Islands loses its main economic support.