"I wonder if he has any plans or if he is, like me, in despair." This is how Santiago, the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway's famous work, wondered about the swordfish that had finally bitten his hook and was not willing to let go.
Despair is a noun very often linked to the sea that we love so much in the Canary Islands, which has been - and is - for us sustenance and a way to go or return. And, despair is precisely what the one thousand two hundred Canarian families who live from tuna fishing must feel, and to whom the State Government has denied, once again, the possibility of earning the life that their efforts deserve.
Anyone who has had to look for food in the sea every day knows that it is anything but easy work. It is the furthest thing from a gifted and peaceful existence. The one who goes out to sea to work never knows if he will return, or in what conditions. "The sea is sweet and beautiful, but it can be cruel." It is not literature, I wish it were. That harshness, that effort is what appears in Fernando's eyes, what is seen in Manuel's weathered hands and in the stories told by each of the fishermen who, in an artisanal way, continue to go out, when possible, to catch fish in each of the eight islands. In those stories there is only sweat, effort, man in the eternal struggle to get ahead.
It is a repeated reality in the Canary Islands that, however, the Government in office does not seem to understand. It has happened again and it has happened many times. It has happened again and it is not because of ignorance of reality, nor because we have not defended it to exhaustion. But the truth is that, persisting in the error, an unjustified outrage has been committed against the Canarian artisanal fleet, by assigning it the ridiculous amount of 40 more tons of bluefin tuna to fish, having increased this year 570 tons for the entire State and having, a single ship of those who work in the Peninsula, more than double the tons assigned than the 247 ships of the Canarian fleet together. To continue accumulating absurdities, in the same document that the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment sends to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) the reduction of the number of Canarian ships from 247 to 108 is promoted, leaving the authorized fleet in less than half. I wonder what idea the Ministry has of what it means for those one thousand two hundred Canarian families that the assigned tuna quota is caught in a few hours, leaving their livelihood suspended and their hopes placed on someone, in Madrid, in Europe, one day reason will dawn and understand that we are not talking about minor things, because survival never is. I keep thinking about what arbitrary criteria their managers may have chosen to decide that, instead of repairing the grievances that have been repeated for years, they are going to multiply them, and with them the despair of people who only want to be able to exercise their trade and support their family in the most dignified way known. With their hands.
In the coming days we will request in Congress the appearance of the acting minister, Isabel García Tejerina. We will have to remind her that among those functions, precisely, is to ensure an equitable distribution of a tuna quota that barely gives for anything, which will be collected in a few hours by artisanal fishermen, who are, specifically, those that ICCAT recommends that should be prioritized in the distribution. Paradoxes of life.
We will arrive, as always, and in support of the Government of the Canary Islands and each of these families, as far as we have to go. The daily effort of that thousand men and women deserves it. Their struggle is also ours.
Ana María Oramas, Deputy of Coalición Canaria in Congress
