For years, Gabon argued that its 19-year Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA) with the European Union was fundamentally unequal, returning the country less than 8% of the value the tuna ultimately fetched on the European market.

Now, Gabon is ending the arrangement.

Much of the international media coverage has framed this as Europe losing access to Gabon's waters. From an African perspective, however, it is the story of a nation choosing to capture more of the value generated by its own fisheries.

Gabon's decision is the fisheries equivalent of a broader trend across Africa, where governments are increasingly seeking to move up the value chain by creating jobs, developing local industries, and adding value domestically rather than exporting it abroad.

In essence, SFPAs are access-for-cash agreements. They grant European-flagged vessels the right to fish in the waters of African coastal and island states in exchange for access fees and financial contributions. In many cases, the tuna is landed and processed elsewhere, leaving much of the economic value generated by those fisheries outside the countries where the fish are taken.

Under its agreement with Gabon, the European Union paid €2.6 million per year in exchange for access to 32,000 tonnes of tuna. European fishing vessels also paid an additional €80 per tonne.

Even using a conservative first-sale market value of €70 to €90 million, the total payments amount to less than 8% of the tuna's value, leaving the overwhelming share of the economic benefit in the hands of French and Spanish businesses.

For years, Gabon sought to encourage more tuna to be landed and processed domestically. Successive governments invested in rebuilding the country's processing capacity and upgrading port infrastructure in the hope that more of the value generated by Gabon's tuna fishery would remain in the country. Despite assurances that landings would increase, the tuna never came.

It is little wonder that Gabon has grown skeptical of the word "partnership" in the SFPA acronym.

Across the African continent, governments are increasingly taking bold and transformative action to move up the value chain.

Namibia and Botswana transformed their diamond industries by ensuring more diamonds were cut and polished domestically before export.

Ghana and neighboring Côte d'Ivoire have spent decades expanding domestic cocoa processing rather than exporting only cocoa beans.

Nigeria faced the paradox of being one of Africa's largest crude oil producers while importing much of its refined fuel. The construction of the Dangote Refinery fundamentally changed that equation, allowing Nigeria to refine more of its own crude domestically and export higher-value petroleum products.

Gabon itself has already demonstrated the success of this approach. In 2010, it banned the export of raw logs, requiring timber to be processed domestically before export. Following the ban, employment in the timber sector tripled while the sector's contribution to GDP quadrupled.

Defenders of the SFPA will argue that, with the European fishing fleet removed, less regulated fleets may take its place.

But that is a false choice.

The objective is not to replace one foreign fleet with another. It is to build domestic capacity, strengthen regulatory oversight, and ensure that a greater share of the economic value generated by Gabon's tuna remains in Gabon.

Meanwhile, under Operation Albacore, Gabonese authorities continue to patrol their waters in partnership with Sea Shepherd. Since the partnership began, those patrols have led to the arrest of 13 fishing vessels for illegal fishing and send a clear message to any operators tempted to fill the void left by the European fleet.

In 2016, when Sea Shepherd first began assisting the Gabonese government with at-sea inspections of European tuna purse seiners, one French captain remarked that he had been fishing in Gabonese waters for 17 years and had never been boarded or inspected.

Had European vessels been required to land their catches in Gabonese ports then, every landing would also have created an opportunity for inspection there.

There is now an opportunity for Gabon's tuna populations to recover from years of intensive fishing pressure. Strong environmental policy, coupled with a sustained enforcement presence, can restore abundance to Gabon's waters while ensuring that the future belongs both to the people of Gabon and to a thriving marine ecosystem.