On the last weekend of June 2026, the Sea Shepherd vessel Age of Union tracked a European purse seiner out of Gabonese waters. It was the final EU tuna boat to leave. By June 29, the country’s exclusive economic zone was closed to the French and Spanish fleets that had fished it since 2007.

The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA) expired on June 28. Gabon did not renew it. Nineteen years of cooperation ended with a government statement, not a signing ceremony.

Under the deal’s final protocol (2021 to 2026), up to 27 EU purse seiners, six pole-and-line tuna vessels and four exploratory crustacean trawlers had access to Gabon’s waters.

In return, the EU paid Gabon an average of €2.6 million ($3 million) a year for access to 32,000 tons of tuna, plus an additional €80 per tonne landed by individual vessels.

An independent evaluation commissioned by the European Commission found Gabon captured just 23% of the total economic value its own fishery generated. Nearly half went to other countries because EU vessels rarely used Gabonese ports or processing facilities.

Peter Hammarstedt, Chief Campaigns Officer at Sea Shepherd, put the shortfall in structural terms: “SFPAs were designed as fisheries access agreements, not as economic development agreements.”

Using a conservative first-sale market value of €70 million to €90 million for the same tuna once it reached Europe, Gabon’s total payments amounted to less than 8% of what its fish were actually worth.

Gabon’s government has been building this case since June 2025, when a Council of Ministers meeting first floated renegotiation. Government spokesperson Charles Edgard Mombo used a January 2026 address to frame the eventual break as a matter of sovereignty over fishery resources, not a rejection of European partnership itself.

President Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema had already called the arrangement lopsided.

The formal end came from Colonel Maurice Ntossui Allogo, Gabon’s Minister of Water and Forests, the Sea, and the Environment, who announced on June 29 that the protocol would not be renewed.

Talks in the first half of 2026, including a Partnership Dialogue on June 8 co-chaired by Vice President Hermann Immongault and EU Ambassador Cécile Abadie, failed to close the gap between what Gabon wanted on local landings and processing and what Brussels was prepared to offer.

The European Commission called the decision a surprise but confirmed Gabon’s sovereign right to walk away. Brussels says it has been ready to negotiate new terms since October 2025 and hopes a future Gabon deal could model a next generation of fisheries partnerships.

The EU currently holds SFPAs with seven other African countries, including Mauritius and Mauritania, both due to expire later this year. Eight existing SFPAs sit dormant.

Gabon’s move fits a wider shift in how resource-rich African states are treating raw exports. Namibia and Botswana pushed diamond cutting and polishing onshore. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire built up domestic cocoa processing rather than shipping out beans. Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery let the country refine more of its own crude instead of importing fuel it had exported as oil.

Gabon has already tested the model on timber. A 2010 ban on raw log exports forced processing onshore; employment in the sector tripled and its contribution to GDP quadrupled in the years that followed.

Hammarstedt drew the same line for tuna: Gabon spent years building port infrastructure and processing capacity that the EU’s own evaluation later judged inadequate, without the landings ever materializing to justify the investment.In his account, Gabon has simply grown skeptical of the word “partnership” in the SFPA acronym.

The Sea Shepherd partnership matters here too. Since Gabon and Sea Shepherd began joint patrols under Operation Albacore, they have led to the arrest of 13 fishing vessels for illegal activity. Sea Shepherd first started boarding EU purse seiners for inspection in 2016; before that, one French captain told the organization he had fished Gabonese waters for 17 years without ever being boarded.

That enforcement question now sits at the centre of what comes next. Losing the EU fleet removes one set of vessels, but it does not remove the incentive for less regulated operators to fill the gap. Gabonese authorities argue continued patrols, not a new access-for-cash deal, are what will keep that from happening.

Nothing in Gabon’s decision closes the door permanently. Officials on both sides describe the end of the SFPA as an opening for a different kind of agreement, one weighted more toward local landings, processing jobs and conservation funding rather than a flat annual fee.

Whether that materializes depends on two things: whether Gabon can attract the investment needed to actually process the tuna it now controls, and whether Brussels is willing to negotiate a deal that pays closer to what the fish are worth.

Experts observed that for now, Gabon’s waters belong to Gabon. What gets built around that fact, port by port, will determine whether this becomes a case study in resource sovereignty or a cautionary tale about capacity outpacing ambition.