Download on emptying seas a vanishing way of life

On Emptying Seas, A Vanishing Way of Life
By Nicole Itano, The Christian Science Monitor
January 16, 2008
Cabras, Italy - Seven hours after setting out into the inky 3 a.m. blackness, the Crazy
Horse's two-man crew pulls back into port with the fruits of their morning's labor: just a
few small buckets of fish, worth maybe $60.
"That's the average now," sighs Gianni Pisanu, whose boat is docked nearby, as he
helps his neighbors tie up. "The sea is impoverished now."
For more than 50 years, the nearly two dozen countries bordering the Mediterranean
have struggled to jointly manage the shared bounty of the sea, whose uniqueness
makes managing this crisis both unusually difficult and extremely important.
But their efforts have stalled often amid the conflicting political and economic interests in
this diverse region, which contains everything from the heavily subsidized Italian fleet –
one of the biggest in the sea with more than 14,000 boats – to thousands of subsistence
fishermen in Morocco.
The benefits of preservation are manifold, however, in this marine ecosystem, whose
share of global biodiversity is eight times greater than its size.
Now, that diversity is threatened. According to the United Nations, 85 percent of species
in the sea are already being fished at or above sustainable levels. Some are near
commercial extinction.
Other species, like turtles, dolphins, and sharks, often caught accidentally in fishermen's
nets, are also being driven toward extinction. A recent report by the World Conservation
Union, which monitors endangered species, found that 42 percent of the sea's 71 shark
and ray species are threatened or endangered – a global high. Fishing is the most
serious threat, the report found.
As his friends untangle the last fish from their nets, Mr. Pisanu watches a large vessel
with a giant metal apparatus on its stern chug out to sea. "A bottom trawler," he explains,
describing a kind of boat that arrived here two decades ago, dragging weighted nets.
"Before trawling, the catches would have been 80 percent bigger."
Double the catch levels of 1950
Twice as many fish are caught in the Mediterranean today than in 1950. The
Mediterranean alone cannot provide enough fish to meet local needs. Southern
Europeans eat significantly more fish than the global average of 35 pounds per person
annually. Spaniards consume 90 pounds a year, while Italians, French, and Greeks, eat
almost 45 pounds – much of which is imported. Though catches are down from their
mid-1980s peak, the fact that fishermen expend greater effort to catch fewer fish
indicates that stocks are overexploited. Trawling has been identified as the most
environmentally destructive type of fishing here.
"The fundamental problem is that the sea is not managed with the objective of
conservation, or rational management of the resource, but mostly in the short-term
interest of those few fishermen who take as much as they can," says Alessandro Gianni,
a fisheries campaigner with Greenpeace, whom Pisanu contacted for help. "The more
economically profitable ... [push] out the smaller artisanal fishermen."
Gianni Usai, regional director of Legapesca, the largest local fisherman's cooperative in
Cabras, was one of the first locals to recognize that there was a problem. Twenty years
ago, he began to notice that lobster catches were declining, from 10 tons a year in the
mid-1980s to between 3 and 4 tons in the early 1990s. Today, local fishermen catch less
than half a ton. But for years, his warnings were ignored.
"When there's a fire in the woods ... everyone is upset and goes and stops it. In the sea,
it's like there's been a fire forever, but no one does a thing," says Mr. Usai.
A solution: marine parks
One solution to overfishing that is increasingly being considered by environmental
groups and even fishing groups like Legapesca is the creation of marine parks. Those
would ban or severely limit fishing. A pilot project near Cabras to create a protected area
for lobsters to breed has had some success, says Usai.
But while there's general agreement that Mediterranean fishing needs to be curtailed,
attempts to do so have sputtered in the region's unique political and biological
environment. In part because of the sea's rich biodiversity, the vast majority of fishing
here does not target specific species. With the exception of a few boats that focus on
high-value fish, like bluefin tuna and swordfish, most fishermen scoop up whatever their
nets happen to catch. This makes conservation techniques used elsewhere, such as
catch quotas, largely ineffective.
And with 21 countries, plus the Palestinian territories, bordering the sea and sharing its
resources, political agreements can be hard to arrive at.
"The particular thing about the Mediterranean is that most of the waters are international
waters," says Susanna St. Trappa, a fisheries expert with World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
"Every solution must come with consensus and to reach consensus with 21 countries is
a very big task."
International efforts to curtail overfishing
The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, established under the United
Nations, serves as a forum for cooperation on fisheries issues. Environmental groups
credit it with becoming more aggressive in recent years about brokering agreements –
such as a 2005 ban on bottom trawling in waters deeper than 3,000 feet. In addition, the
European Union now bans the practice close to shore in waters less than 150 feet deep.
And there is a general consensus about what the root of the problem is: overcapacity.
Although there are fierce debates about how to measure it, the EU estimates that its
fishing capacity in all its waters, including the Mediterranean, is 40 percent higher than is
sustainable.
But efforts to reduce capacity have failed, or in some cases backfired. On the northern
shore – there's little data from the south – the total number of European boats fishing the
Mediterranean has decreased. But environmental groups say that EU subsidies intended
to help fishermen modernize their fleet enabled many to upgrade from small boats like
Pisanu's 33-ft. Nina, which he inherited from his father, to bigger, more environmentally
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damaging vessels. In Cabras, for example, local fishing organizations say subsidies
helped fishermen purchase many of the devastatingly efficient trawlers based there.
In Italy – which has the largest fishing industry in the Mediterranean – trawlers make up
only a small percentage of the fishing fleet, but account for more than half of catches.
But bottom trawling churns up the sea floor, destroying vital habitat for many bottomdwelling species, and is among the most wasteful forms of fishing. Although estimates
vary widely, up to 70 percent of the fish caught by bottom trawlers are thrown back
because they are the wrong type.
Legally, trawlers shouldn't be fishing the same waters as Pisanu. Artisanal fishermen still
own and operate two-thirds of the region's boats but are rapidly being outfished by
bigger, more technologically advanced boats.
But Usai says enforcement is difficult because few fishermen, even environmentally
conscious ones, are completely compliant with current laws. It's hard, he admits, to ask
authorities to enforce regulations only against big boats.
But if nothing changes, small fishermen like Pisanu say their life on the sea is
threatened. "It's my passion," he says. "But I can't really say if I'll be fishing in 20 years."
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