Traditional fishing has been harmed by EU fishing policies that favour big businesses and ignore sustainable approaches to conserving fish stocks.<\/p>\n
This is\u00a0the main finding\u00a0of research by DICE alumna Dr Alicia Said, Professor\u00a0Douglas MacMillan<\/a>, and Dr\u00a0Joseph Tzanopoulos\u00a0<\/a>published in the world-leading open-access journal\u00a0Frontiers in Marine Sciences<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n To uncover the impact these actions have on local fishing fleets, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with fishing communities, fishers and policy people, combined with\u00a0detailed economic and policy analysis. The report found that traditional fishermen were being\u00a0driven from the sea\u00a0by specific policies that favour larger boats and richer owners.<\/p>\n Furthermore,\u00a0inadequate safeguards around informal recreational fishing meant that the pressures on vulnerable fish stocks\u00a0such as scorpionfish, red seabream, mullets and other prestigious fisheries has actually\u00a0intensified.<\/p>\n The study examined the\u00a0highly controversial and complex subject of \u2018blue-grabbing\u2019\u00a0\u2013 the \u2018legal\u2019\u00a0appropriation of\u00a0marine resources from traditional users through policies and governance systems that favour large-scale fisheries – and other activities such as marine conservation for ecotourism.<\/p>\n Professor MacMillan says that EU policy focuses\u00a0too much\u00a0on fish stock conservation and has\u00a0no meaningful policy\u00a0regulations\u00a0to ensure that quotas for over-fished stock such as tuna\u00a0are equitably shared amongst fishermen. He said, “This allows individual nations to implement their own policies, which more often than not are\u00a0captured by local elites to enhance their wealth and power\u00a0through, for example, capturing all the quota. Furthermore, additional conservation measures such as no fishing zones are\u00a0crude and tend to\u00a0curtail all fishing activity\u00a0over large segments of coastal waters, regardless of whether the fishing undertaken there is sustainable or not.”<\/p>\n Dr Said, who is from a traditional Maltese fishing community, said, “In Malta, the\u00a0small, traditional fishermen have essentially been pushed out of the water\u00a0and their livelihood by government and EU policies that were actually intended to conserve fish stocks. At the end of the day, the\u00a0small guy ends up with nothing\u00a0but a meagre\u00a0retirement package, fishing\u00a0communities fall into a\u00a0spiral of decay and profits for the large boat owners soar as\u00a0they can capture all the quota and use cheap, often illegal labour to catch the\u00a0fish.”<\/p>\n Working closely with the local fishing community,\u00a0the research has been discussed among key government officers, reaching as high as the Prime Minister of Malta, and a major reallocation of quotas for tuna and other commercially important species to the traditional fishing fleet has been promised.<\/p>\n The research was presented to the Ministers of the Mediterranean, who met in Malta for a high-level Ministerial Conference on 25th\u00a0<\/sup>and 26th<\/sup>\u00a0September to discuss the issues of\u00a0small-scale fisheries sustainability, and one hopes that this article will bring positive change in the governance of fisheries in the Mediterranean region.<\/p>\n ‘The contested commons:\u00a0The failure of EU fisheries policy and governance in the Mediterranean and the crisis enveloping the small-scale fisheries of Malta<\/a>‘ by Alicia Said, Douglas MacMillan and Joseph Tzanopoulos, is published in\u00a0Frontiers in Marine Science, section Marine Fisheries, Aquaculture and Living Resources<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Traditional fishing has been harmed by EU fishing policies that favour big businesses and ignore sustainable approaches to conserving fish stocks. 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