Foreign tuna fishing companies, mostly from Asia, have been exploiting Madagascar’s waters since the 1950s. The bloc that is now the European Union joined the hunt in 1986 and didn’t stop for decades, renewing its deal with Madagascar every few years.

Yet when the last Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA), as the deals are now called, expired at the end of 2018, negotiations on a new one had reached a standstill — and there they remained. For four and a half years, no vessels flagged to EU countries could fish in Madagascar’s waters.

Finally, in late June, Madagascar and the EU signed a new SFPA. The EU says the deal benefits Madagascar by providing key funding for fisheries governance, and civil society groups praised the Madagascar government for creating a more inclusive and transparent negotiating process than in the past.

However, critics argue that the deal benefits neither the Malagasy people nor the European public to a large degree, but rather a narrow set of private interests: fishing companies. They point out that the three main commercial tuna species in the Indian Ocean are overfished, and they say the EU will merely be adding to the overexploitation.