Veteran fisherman Martin Caruana is witnessing Marsaxlokk change before his eyes and, looking to the future, he sees the popular bay sapped of its quintessential colour.

How long before that happens? “The average age of fishermen is over 50,” he said. “Traditional fishing is dying out, and many artisanal fishermen are having to resort to making money on the side as water taxis, ferrying tourists around the bay and to St Peter’s Pool.”

The 63-year-old’s family cycle is testament to that narrative. His three children have no intention of taking over the family fishery that had been passed down many generations. They got into salaried work instead. The fami­ly fishery will die with him.

“You would have to be crazy to get into fishing now,” Mr Caruana lamented. “It’s no longer possible to make a decent living from fishing.”

Researcher Alicia Said concurs. “I know children of fishing families who try their hand at other work and then they return to fishing because it’s the occupation they know best, and the occupation that gives them a sense of freedom,” observed Said, who has recently studied Malta’s small-scale fishermen for her PhD in Biodiversity Management and Human Ecology.

“But the replacement rate of young men taking up fishing falls way below the fishermen who are retiring, and at the present replacement rate there will be no artisanal fishermen left in Marsaxlokk 40 years from now.”

A fisherman mending a net on the shore next to his boat in Marsaxlokk. Traditional boats constitute the bulk of Malta's fishing fleet.A fisherman mending a net on the shore next to his boat in Marsaxlokk. Traditional boats constitute the bulk of Malta's fishing fleet.

Other small, traditional fishing communities around the Mediterranean face the same fate. The EU in theory provides varied assistance to small-scale fishermen. So does the Maltese government, but it’s not sufficient to withstand the encroachments of the big fishers – the industrialisation of fishing continues apace.

Mr Caruana founded the NGO Marsaxlokk Artisanal Fishermen a year ago to give a voice to small-scale fishermen. The NGO has only managed to gather 20 members, and that’s partly due to hostility from the two fishermen’s cooperatives and a government largely ineffectual in the face of market forces that are pushing artisanal fishermen to the brink of economic failure.

This week the plight of fishermen and the exigencies of conservation are set to rise up the political agenda when the EU holds an international conference in Malta, called Our Ocean, and a host of other events will be held around the island. The conference takes on added urgency given the ecological malaise of the Mediterranean Sea being caused by climate change, marine pollution and overfishing.

Overfishing has become severe – studies show that over 90 per cent of fishable species in the Mediterranean are overfished – and it’s the small-scale fishermen who bear the brunt of the collapse in fish populations. In Malta that means most fishermen, because four-fifths of local fishermen (314 out of 377) have vessels less than 12 metres long, classed as ‘small-scale’ (‘small-scale’ and ‘artisanal’ are used somewhat interchangeably in this article).

“It’s a scientific fact that small-scale fishermen have a lesser impact on the environment but they suffer most from overfishing,” said Ms Said. “The industrialisation of fishing, which is responsible for decimating fish stocks, is not benefitting the average fisherman in Malta. For example, trawlers are catching more fish because of bigger vessels and higher frequency of operations, and that means there would be less fish left for small-scale fishermen.”

Ms Said saw this process starkly in her case-study of the tuna fishery. Maltese fishermen have always hooked tuna by deploying surface long-lines, which are literally fishing lines with hooks attached at intervals of about 30 metres apart. Lines run for many miles, but the catch is modest: an average fishing trip, which lasts around 20 hours, typically yields a handful of tunas. Then along came the large vessels with purse-seine nets, operated mainly by French and Italian fishers, rounding up shoals of tuna, dozens or hundreds-strong, in a single scoop of their massive nets (purse-seine nets draw to a close at the bottom).

A couple of entrepreneurial Maltese then got into the act by setting up tuna farms – Malta now has the largest tuna farming capacity (about 13,800 tons) in the world – which purchase tuna from the purse-seine fishers in international waters and tow them to Malta in cages. Caged tuna are then slaughtered staggeringly according to demand in Japan, where Bluefin tuna is highly prized in sushi and sashimi.

It’s an inefficient industry – a tuna devours about 25kg of mackerel to gain a kilo of weight – but it has become big business: tuna is Malta’s third-largest export, generating more than a €100 million annually.

You would have to be crazy to get into fishing now. It’s no longer possible to make a decent living from fishing

Aggressive fishing by the purse-seiners eventually led to a steep decline in the tuna population, and a recovery plan was put into effect seven years ago by the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), establishing a system of quotas and intense monitoring. The recovery plan proved effective: the tuna population has been increasing in recent years.

“I find it contradictory that the conservation effort has perversely empowered the purse-seine tuna fishery at the expense of the more sustainable long-line fishery of the Maltese fleet,” Ms Said argued. “That’s be­cause it’s the industrial purse-seine fishers who are once again mostly benefitting from the increase in the tuna population.”

Virtually all of Malta’s fishermen – excluding a single purse-seiner – fish for tuna with long lines. Tuna fishers used to be numerous but their numbers fell steeply after 2010 when ICCAT requested reductions in long-line fishers in the Mediterranean, something that was accomplished in Malta by paying tuna fishermen who voluntarily quit and by the issuance of a policy that disallowed fishermen with quotas of less than 200kg from fishing for tuna.

Now only 22 long-line tuna fishers remain in Malta, and some of them transfer their quota to the fish farms (the fishermen with big vessels who transfer their quotas then make extra money towing cages of tuna to Malta for the fish farms).

The same fish farm operators also double as export agents, buying up good quality tuna caught by Maltese long-liners, once again destined for the Japanese market, and that means that the entire tuna fishery in Malta is virtually controlled by a few large operators. This has skewed the local tuna market in favour of exports (most of the best quality tuna goes for export and the exporters’ rejects go to the local market).

“In the past,” Ms Said pointed out, “an average fisherman who had good catches during the tuna and dorado seasons would have made money for the whole year. Now many of these fishermen have lost the chance to fish for tuna, and catches of dorado have been dwindling, so it’s a double whammy for Malta’s small-scale fishermen.” Some fishermen have taken to doing stints of work at the tuna fish farms for a meagre €6 an hour. Others have had to resort to working longer and harder in near-shore fishing with trammel nets.

These nets are called tal-parit in Maltese, derived from the Italian parete, which means wall: all types of fish get entangled in the three-layered nets set upright throughout the profile of the sea in relatively shallow waters. Some of Malta’s most colourful demersal fishes are caught in trammel nets – the likes of scorpionfish, gurnard, dentex, pandora, seabass, grouper, spotted weever and bogue.

“Greater reliance on trammel net fishing in turn led to diminishing catches of demersal species,” Ms Said continued. “That’s an example of how industrialisation of the tuna fishery has had a cascade of negative effects on the majority of fishermen and the environment.”

The greater density of trammel-net fishers may be having an impact on the five coastal marine protected zones. “In Dwejra there are fishermen who deploy their trammel nets very close to shore, even among scuba divers,” said marine biologist and university lecturer Professor Alan Deidun. “And in other places I am aware of, conflicts sometimes develop between anglers and trammel net fishermen.”

The sea off Dwejra forms part of one of  Malta’s five marine protected areas, all part of the Natura 2000 network, which stretch along substantial swathes of coastal waters. Another eight marine protected areas have been designated offshore within the Fisheries Management Zone, and five more are in the works for designation (offshore sites protect the foraging and staging grounds of Malta’s seabirds as well as marine species, such as dolphins and loggerhead turtles).

The protected areas amount to around 30 per cent of the sea within 25 nautical miles of the shore – that’s a large proportion of Malta’s sea, making Malta among the most ambitious in setting marine protected areas (at least on paper). Management plans are currently being drawn up by the Environment Resources Authority.

Prof. Deidun suggests site-specific controls on trammel-net fishing. “We have to experiment with controls going forward. For example, in some places it can be prohibited from within a certain distance from shore, de­pending on the depth of the sea, of course. Other possible measures could be to use nets with larger mesh, something that could either be enforced in all protected zones or in certain areas such as bays. Other possible controls could be put in place in spring, when fish spawn.”

The Marsaxlokk Artisanal Fishermen welcome more stringent conservation measures. “One of the aims of our NGO,” says Mr Caruana, “is to promote sustainable fishing. After all, the crisis in fishing is caused by overfishing, trawling and other disruptive practices, such as employment of cheap foreign labour by the large fishing operators.”

A swordfish caught on a long-line is hauled up by a Maltese fisherman working alone on a small launch in the central Mediterranean.A swordfish caught on a long-line is hauled up by a Maltese fisherman working alone on a small launch in the central Mediterranean.

Mr Caruana comes out strongly for banning Malta’s 12 trawlers from the country’s Fisheries Management Zone, which was declared a ‘conservation zone’ prior to joining the EU, a creative move by the government to keep out large fishers from other EU countries.

Trawling is a travesty of conservation: it’s one of the most destructive fishing operations in existence. Trawlers drag a bell-shaped net along the bottom of the sea that scoops in everything along its path; then the catch is tipped onboard and the edibles sepa­rated from the non-edibles. The non-edi­bles, which in certain types of trawling (particularly trawling for shrimps) can account for more than half of the entire catch, are then thrown back into the sea dead.

A lot is wasted in this manner: a recent study has estimated that 380 tons of non-edible fish are discarded by Maltese fishermen, mostly by trawlers (that’s more than the entire yearly catch of dorado).

The small-scale fishermen now also have to contend with large fishermen in another fishery - swordfish – which is on the brink of collapse. The plummeting population of Mediterranean swordfish prompted ICCAT to roll out a recovery plan for swordfish that includes catch quotas and other measures. Malta’s quota for swordfish this year was 432 tons, less than the 489 tons caught naturally in 2015. At the time of writing, 315 tons had been caught in what’s shaping up to be a disastrous season.

The government is leaving too much in the hands of market forces

“Swordfish was very scarce this year,” said Leli Caruana, a swordfish fisherman who fishes from a 15-metre launch and hauls in four tons worth of swordfish in a normal year.

“I know of fishermen who used to catch 15 tons of swordfish, and this year they went out  three times and caught none, and called it a season. The bulk of Malta’s quota of swordfishes was caught by the big boats in the western Mediterranean near Spain.”

Unusually, Malta’s quota this year wasn’t allocated to fishermen divisibly and individually, based on historical catches. It was left undivided, a national quota, the plan being that the season would be closed as soon as the quota is fulfilled. This was a decision taken high up the political pecking order; it has all the hallmarks of a political move designed to appease the very small near-shore swordfish fishermen who do not normally declare their catches for tax evasion purposes – and maybe that’s a good thing.

Andreina Fenech Farrugia, director general of the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, said  this methodology will be reassessed at the end of the year and the department might adopt a system of allocation  depending on that reassessment and con­sultation with fishermen.

Ms Said, the most articulate voice in defence of small-scale fishermen, believes quota allocation to fishermen individually is more equitable and appropriate. She spoke against neoliberalism in the fishing sector and argued for heavier-handed intervention by the government in favour of the small-scale fishermen.

“The government is leaving too much in the hands of market forces. It should instead adopt an allocation system based on the socio-economic dependency of fishermen.”

Mr Caruana said: “Not allocating the quotas has created a lot of uncertainty. I fear that in years to come this would give a chance to the big fishermen – those who can put a boat at sea for two weeks at a time – to fulfill the bulk of the quota at smaller fishermen’s expense.”

These fears may never come to pass, but the trepidation and resignation that has gripped Malta’s small-scale fishermen is palpable. After being partially or largely squeezed out of tuna fishing, these fishermen have now seen their catches of dorado plummet – just 233 tons of dorado were caught in 2016, down from 430 tons in 2010, which was itself down from 559 tons in 2006 (that was a boon year). This year the dorado season is similarly measly for Malta’s 114 dorado fishers.

And at a time of scarcity – to use an analogy from fishing – the few big fish are gobbling the numerous small fish, and not only is the charm and touristy fame of Marsaxlokk in peril, it’s the fishing community itself that is imperiled: all that knowledge and guardianship that has been passed down many generations is at risk of disappearing.

We risk losing an entire subculture, losing the artisanal fishermen, for so long the guardians of the sea.

The bottom line

■ There are 377 full-time fishermen in Malta – 314 of them are classed as small-scale.

■ Only 22 long-line tuna fishers remain.

■ The average age of fishermen is over 50, and the replacement rate of young fishermen falls short of retirees.

■ Income for Malta’s artisanal fishermen has been falling – unless they are assisted they will die out.

■ Malta’s tuna industry is worth more than €100 million but it hasn’t benefitted the average fishermen.

■ Swordfish populations in the central Mediterranean have collapsed – this year has been disastrous.

■ Dorado catches have plummeted – last year, Malta’s 114 dorado fishermen landed less than half the amount they were landing 10 years ago.

■ Studies show that around 93 per cent of edible fish in the Mediterranean are overfished.

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