Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/722943
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2016 12 MATTHEW VELLA ARTISANAL fishermen in Malta have become 'powerless specta- tors' to the way the Bluefin tuna fishery industry has been taken over by the large purse seiners and foreign interests in tuna ranching. A long-standing tradition of small-scale fishers that existed since the 1700s, which used hook- and-line methods baited with mackerel, has now given way to the tuna giants, intensive technology and their tuna fattening ranches, commanding prices that can only force small fishers out of business. But this rapid transformation into industrialised fishing was also carried out with the direct bless- ing of the government in 2001, and since then, the tuna ranching industry has suffocated artisanal fishers. In a field study carried out by the Durrell Institute of Conserva- tion and Ecology at the University of Kent, social scientists met with Maltese fishermen whose liveli- hoods were irrevocably changed by the advent of industrialised tuna fishing. The industrial turn Initially tuna was fished using the tunnara artisanal trap system, and after the 1960s using hook-and- line methods such as long-line gear. But it was during the 1990s that the international demand for toro meat – tuna belly, prized in Japan for sashimi and sushi – led to an increase in Maltese exports to the international market. Industrialised methods allowed fishing companies like Ricardo Fuentes to capture enormous numbers of tuna using purse sein- ers, to provide enough live bluefin tuna to stock ranches with hun- dreds of tonnes of tuna from just one trip. While industrial giants used technology to detect areas where the fish are, traditional fish- ers catch one fish at a time and are led to their prey by seagulls. Overfishing and exploitation soon gave way to 'tuna wars', as competition for the species be- came intense. Scientists Alicia Said, Joseph Tzanopoulos, and Douglas Mac- millan – who interviewed fishing communities in Marsaxlokk and Mgarr (Gozo) between May 2014 and August 2015 – locate 2001 as the start of a government-mandat- ed shift in policy, when then fish- eries minister Ninu Zammit called on Maltese fishermen to "equip themselves like their [foreign] competitors" and issued the first purse-seine permits in 2005. Today the industry has generat- ed some €500 million in sales over the past six years alone, and oper- ates a fattening capacity of 12,300 tonnes. But it's this rapid growth that brought enormous stress on tuna resources from overfishing. Calls for quotas, imposed by the In- ternational Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), eventually led to the in- troduction of the total allowable catch (TAC). In Malta, the TAC system brought a drastic overhaul of fish- ermen's lives, as the government and the fishermen's coops agreed on radical changes: reducing the Bluefin tuna fleet capacity by 25%, allowing fishermen to transfer their quotas (individual transfera- ble quotas, or ITQs) and allocating just up to 2% of the national TAC for recreational tuna fishermen. Buying out small fishermen When the purse seine permits were issued in 2005 to companies such as AJD Tuna of Azzopardi Fisheries, and MFF Ltd, this indus- try did not have a historical record of catch due to its late entry to the tuna fleet. Since it could not be assigned a specific quota, these big tuna com- panies could only participate in the industry by buying the ITQs from artisanal fishermen, who had their own historical catch records. By 2009, the ITQ scheme recog- nized just 20% of the full-time fleet (82 vessels) and 0.6% of the part- time fleet (four vessels) as tuna fishing rights-holders. The rest of the vessel owners were excluded from the quota, because they did not have official records of tuna catches declared at the central fish market. According News Powerless spectators to t An anthropological study of Maltese artisanal fishermen has revealed how the industrialisation of tuna farming in the 1990s has muscled out small fishers and radically changed Malta's fishing industry Marsaxlokk fisherman Martin Caruana, "the bigger boats [are] carrying 50–70 pieces of nets and working round the clock, thanks to imported cheap labour"- in contrast to small fishers who use 12 nets Immigrant labour is an important source of workers for the tuna fishing industry, as more small-scale Maltese fishers abandon the trade