The Canary Islands have been saddled with an eco-tax under the name of a customs procedure. It's called AIEM (Import and Deliveries of Goods Tax), and it's the toll you have to pay for living in a paradise that sometimes seems more like a bonded warehouse than a blessed land. An institutional kickback, under the guise of industrial protection, taxes products that aren't even dreamed of being manufactured on the islands, but which nevertheless appear on the list as if factories were built here to make washing machines, tofu sausages, or toys with rechargeable batteries.
The AIEM is just that: a customs tax collected on behalf of the REF, the Canary Islands Economic and Fiscal Regime, but it works like a nightclub bouncer: it raises the price of entry for some, denies others entry, and ruins the night for most. Between 2020 and 2022, this tax has put 50% more revenue in the Canary Islands Government's pocket, with a closing total of 2022 million euros in 225, while the people bleed to death in the aisles of supermarkets, juggling to fill a basket that keeps getting bigger in cost even if it's lean on content. But here's the detail that neither Brussels, nor the Ministry of Finance, nor the champions of tax justice seem to want to see: the AIEM has already far exceeded the legal ceiling of 150 million euros that had been established as the maximum limit for this tax. A figure that has been surpassed without shame, without communication, and without consequences.
This excess is neither a minor detail nor an administrative anecdote: it is a true institutional ridiculousness. A flagrant violation of legal limits that highlights the lack of control and the permissiveness with which the Canary Islands are treated, as if this archipelago were a second-class territory, where the rules are flexible and the citizens are mere resigned taxpayers. Therefore, the sensible, urgent, and unavoidable thing to do is to immediately suspend the AIEM (Spanish Tax Administration Service), to avoid further ridicule in the eyes of Europe and to alleviate the heavy burden falling on the Canary Islands. And at the height of this absurdity, the list was expanded. When he was Minister of Finance, Román Rodríguez—the one who speaks of Canary Islands identity with one hand in his pocket and the other in the till—decided in 2020 to add items for entire families. And at the same time, he is calling for an eco-tax for tourists.
As if just because someone makes palm brooms in Fuerteventura, smart vacuum cleaners that have never set foot on La Isleta should also be taxed. Sebastián Grisaleña and Agustín Manrique de Lara, long-standing businessmen—with experience, but with common sense—have cried out: that the AIEM protects no one, that there is no industry to justify, and that the result is a burden on the Canarian consumer. That this makes living more expensive, shrinks the middle class, and distances us even further from the mainland, which is already half a dozen salaries and two train journeys ahead of us. But ASINCA, the industrial lobby, clings to the AIEM as if it were their last life raft in an economic shipwreck. Without it, they say, island industry will disappear. As if it were reasonable to build an economic future on a wall of tariffs, rather than on innovation, technology, or talent.
ASINCA president Jorge Escuder calls for its maintenance, for faster updates, and for the list to be more streamlined. He says the AIEM is a kind of life jacket for the 49.000 people who feed the industry in the Canary Islands. And perhaps he's somewhat right, but the problem isn't just in the numbers: it's in the philosophy. Because the AIEM has become the Canary Islands' eco-tax in their own land. A tax for breathing, for buying, for living far from everything, in an archipelago where what arrives comes at a premium and what is produced remains on the margins. Meanwhile, politicians give speeches about food sovereignty and strategic autonomy while importing potatoes from Egypt, onions from Holland, and German yogurt.
And if anyone tries to buy online, the AIEM (Spanish Social Security Tax) comes back to bite: it makes online commerce more expensive and punishes those who want to escape the usual store. The Canary Islands, with their picture-perfect beaches and subsistence wages, are saddled with a tax regime designed to please those at the top and silence those at the bottom. The AIEM has become a tax on forgetfulness, isolation, and resigned conformity. And the Canarians—those who haven't emigrated, those who still have a voice—are barely aware of the situation. They pay as if it were normal. They keep quiet as if it were logical. And they vote as if all this were a necessary evil. But it isn't.
