There's something profoundly grotesque about the fact that gofio, the toasted flour that has fed generations of Canarians since pre-Hispanic times, is today the victim of a tariff tax that claims to be protective but actually smacks of confinement. It's called AIEM (Tax on Imports and Deliveries of Goods) and was designed to defend local industry (almost all of which are now in foreign hands) against the invasion of foreign products. But in this case, what it's doing isn't protecting, but rather shielding with absurd bureaucracy a product that has no enemies.
Because let's be clear: gofio isn't produced anywhere else in the European Union. There are no factories in Bavaria, no mills in Marseille or Soria. No one competes with Canarian gofio because it's unique. So what's the point of putting up barriers to flours that "look similar" to it? Who are we really protecting?
Gofio: figures that debunk the myth of the threat
In 2024, the Canary Islands produced 6.745 tons of gofio. Of these, more than 5.000 tons are consumed locally and another 1.700 tons are exported to markets as diverse as Germany, Japan, and Senegal. Gofio is, therefore, one of the few Canarian agri-food products with its own identity, foreign demand, and a consolidated domestic market.
83% of Canarian households have it in their pantry. 76,6% of the population consumes it regularly, and more than half (56,3%) do so every day or almost every day. On islands like El Hierro and Lanzarote, daily consumption exceeds 60% of the population.
That is to say: not only does it not need protection, but it is a symbol of food resilience and living culture.
An insulting definition
As if that weren't enough, the new list of products subject to AIEM that the Canary Islands government is preparing includes gofio under a technically absurd category: "Cereal-based products obtained by puffing or toasting corn."
Thus, gofio—ancient toasted flour, with no added sugars or industrial extrusion process—ends up being equated with sugary breakfast cereals or processed energy bars. This is a gross technical error, and also a political gesture of disregard for the uniqueness of a food that doesn't fit into any category other than its own.
A fiscal fiction that impoverishes
The technical excuse is that the AIEM also applies to substitute products, that is, those that could take the place of gofio in the market. But that's as vague as saying that sushi competes with papas arrugadas. Under that argument, any mix of toasted cereals, no matter how artisanal, could be caught in the AIEM's tax net.
The perverse thing is that this doesn't strengthen gofio, it isolates it. It turns it into a product trapped between paperwork, tariffs, and TARIC codes that even technicians don't fully understand. Meanwhile, small mills continue to struggle to modernize, export, or innovate. Because the AIEM, in practice, doesn't encourage quality, but rather erects barriers to competition, even healthy competition, even that from within the region itself.
Canary Islands against the Canary Islands
And here comes the most ironic part: if a Canarian agricultural entrepreneur in La Palma wants to import to Tenerife from a toasted flour made on the Peninsula that isn't called gofio, he'll have to pay the AIEM (Spanish Tax on the Imports of Wheat), even if that flour poses no threat to the island market. The system discourages domestic trade between the islands and the Peninsula and turns the Canary Islands into a sort of economic protectorate within the EU, where tradition is protected... through paralysis.
Protection or servitude?
Gofio needs respect, visibility, and quality. It doesn't need a fiscal straitjacket that prevents it from competing. It doesn't need to be treated as if it couldn't defend itself. The AIEM, in its current form, doesn't protect it: it infantilizes it. And in doing so, it condemns the Canary Islands economy to live in an administrative bubble that makes backwardness a virtue and the fear of competition a policy.
