The end of the line
Straining to keep his eyes open, Charles Azzopardi slouches at the wheel of the Madonna Tal-Hniena (‘Madonna of Mercy’) as it bobs about in the central Mediterranean, southwest of Malta. Every 30 minutes or so, he pours another cup of black coffee from a flask and lights a cigarette. ‘Today, it’s the fourth consecutive fishing trip in as many days,’ he tells me. ‘That’s 20 hours of work every day for four days.’
It’s the peak of the two-month tuna-fishing season for Malta’s long-line fishermen. Windy weather had grounded the Madonna Tal-Hniena, an 18-metre, 22-year-old wooden boat that would look at home in a museum, for three weeks, and now the rush is on: the remaining month will determine the year’s profit or loss for the four-man crew. The bluefin tuna – a fish that those on board profess to loathe – has turned their fishing business into an annual cycle of boom and bust. Never before in the generations-old family fishery business has fishing been such an ordeal.
Charles and his brother Tony learned the trade from their father after they had both dropped out of school. Fishing is the only life they know. ‘I cannot read or write,’ Charles tells me. ‘And I can only talk Maltese. It’s embarrassing when a foreigner speaks on the radio and I can’t even answer back.’
He describes himself as being ‘condemned to this work’.
Industrial scale
For the brothers, the travails of fishing became a condemnation about ten years ago, when the Japanese started scouring the Mediterranean for tuna. That’s also when the purse-seine fishery expanded, and tuna ranches sprouted up around the shores of the western Mediterranean, taking whatever the purse seiners could scoop up in their huge nets.
‘The purse-seine boats locate the fish as they congregate to spawn,’ Charles explains. ‘Then they feed them to make the shoal denser, and typically round up 40 tuna in one sweep of the net.
It takes us an entire season to catch as many fish.’
Scooping the fish out of the sea just before spawning is the antithesis of sustainability, but the money involved – a large tuna, weighing 200 kilograms or more, can fetch about £100,000 in Japan, and the Japanese buy 70 per cent of Malta’s catch – ensures that such considerations are pushed to the side. Tuna fishing has become an industrial operation. Different fleets share notes and employ high-tech detection techniques, including sophisticated sonar equipment, and even send up aircraft to search for shoals of tuna from the air.
The Maltese long-line fishermen, all of whom are small-scale and use hooks, have also been swept along in the scramble. Up to 15 years ago, tuna was just another fish in a varied annual fishing cycle. Back then, Maltese fishermen jointly targeted swordfish and tuna between April and August. ‘On an average two-day trip, we used to catch about eight large swordfish,’ Charles says. ‘We didn’t even directly target tuna then, partly because the demand wasn’t high and partly because the fishing line and hooks we used weren’t strong enough to withstand the struggles of large tuna.’
Yet they still managed to catch about ten 250-kilogram tuna every season. Then the tuna suddenly became very valuable, and it now accounts for at least half of the annual income of Maltese fishermen.
Catch quotas were eventually introduced by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), the body responsible for managing tuna fishing. This was another blow to the Maltese fishermen. The natural capacity of Malta’s tuna long-liners – up to 70 are operational; the exact figure is unclear because some fishermen ‘sell’ their quota – is about 350 tonnes, yet this year’s national quota was only 161 tonnes. For the Madonna Tal-Hniena, the natural capacity 15 years ago – when tuna was a by-catch – was 2,500 kilograms; now its quota is 2,000 kilograms. When I joined the crew, they had already caught 13 fish: the largest weighed 150 kilograms – a fluke nowadays, but a pitifully small tuna by historical standards.
‘In the old times,’ Charles says, ‘we worked in a more relaxed manner and we made more money. We used to continue fishing for swordfish and tuna until the dorado season started in mid-August. I miss fishing in July, when the water is calm. Now we can only sit idly in July because the fishing season is closed.’
Traps and lines
Historically, tuna were caught in the Mediterranean using underwater traps. There are still about two dozen such traditional traps in use in the western Mediterranean (in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Italy), but the decimation of the tuna population has reduced the catches to pitiful levels, and use of the traps is now more of a ritual than a serious fishery. In some cases, the traps have become a tourist attraction, bringing in much-needed income to isolated fishing communities.
Maltese fishers represent the next level up. Commercially viable, yet with limited reach: long-line fishing in smallish launches only gives them the capacity to hook an average of two or three tuna during an entire fishing trip lasting up to two days. This doesn’t mean that all long-line fishing is sustainable, however; it’s a matter of degree. ‘Some long-line fleets targeting tuna are large-scale, industrial vessels,’ Gemma Parkes of WWF Mediterranean points out. ‘So long liners also need to be controlled.’
Controls do exist: long-line fishers can only employ up to 2,000 hooks, even on the large vessels. The Madonna Tal-Hniena has just over 1,000 hooks. These hooks are baited with mackerel and squid and then attached at intervals of about 30 metres apart to the main fishing line, which runs to tens of kilometres in length.
Profitable catch
Back on the Madonna Tal-Hniena, the crew start reeling in the line at around 11pm, having left port at midday and deployed the line throughout the afternoon. The men fish at night because tuna come closer to the surface in the dark. Five hours later, there were three tuna and two swordfish on deck – all relatively small, yet enough to leave a handsome profit.
‘It’s an encouraging catch,’ Charles tells his brother Tony. ‘So we can take a day off tomorrow.’
‘Now is our chance to make some money,’ Tony replies.
Charles turns and sees me studying the prints of saints that hang in the boat’s cabin. The most intriguing depicts a vessel in the foreground and God rising in the background, forming a protective embrace around the boat. ‘We have a lot of saints,’ he says with a chuckle.
The launch, constructed of wood, is stable and durable. Charles keeps it in impeccable shape: every year, he gives it a fresh layer of paint. But it’s sturdiness makes it slow, unwieldy and cumbersome in the water. ‘We were going to get an autopilot,’ Charles says. ‘But how can we justify such a cost when our future seems so uncertain and our income so unpredictable? I think my brother and I are at the end of the line in this family business.’
Tuna troubles
The Atlantic bluefin tuna is divided into two subpopulations in the western and eastern Atlantic. It’s the eastern subpopulation that has been ravaged by overfishing.
The fish are caught after they migrate into the calm, warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea to spawn – scooped up in purse-seine nets and transferred to floating cages that are then towed to tuna ranches. There, the fish are fed for about six months before being slaughtered and sold.
It’s estimated that the breeding population has fallen by about 85 per cent compared with historical levels. And as catch statistics reveal a trend towards ever smaller fish being caught, scientists fear that breeding-age tuna – more than four years old and heavier than 35 kilograms – are being systematically wiped out.
In a bid to control overexploitation, catch quotas are tightening: this year’s quota was 13,500 tonnes, down from 19,950 tonnes in 2009. Monitoring has also been intensified, but illegal fishing is still prevalent, and the true catch is acknowledged to be higher than the quota. Frequent discrepancies between catch and trade statistics are an indication that tuna ranches under-declare the tuna they take in. (The tuna ranches explain these discrepancies by natural growth during the fattening stage, but natural growth isn’t as high as the discrepancies indicate, according to scientists and fishery officials.)
‘Farm capacity is unsustainably high, and the ranches are part of the spiral of overexploitation,’ says Gemma Parkes of WWF. As with other fish farming, there is also the problem of a low biomass conversion ratio: a tuna needs 20 kilograms or more of mackerel to gain an extra kilogram of weight.
In Malta – which has a tuna-ranching capacity of 12,300 tonnes, the world’s highest – tuna fattening has become big business. Tuna now constitute the island’s third-largest export commodity, generating about €100million annually. The tuna ranchers, as well as the purse-seine fishermen, have become millionaires.
In contrast, the Maltese long-line fishermen have seen their work become increasingly difficult, and are no better off, financially, than before. Yet the long-line fishermen don’t have a voice – most can’t even read or write. They are organised into two cooperatives: about 16 are members of the Ghaqda Kooperativa Tas-Sajd, and about 40 belong to the Fishermen Cooperative. The secretary of the former is the owner of a trawler, while the secretary of the latter, Raymond Bugeja, owns a tuna ranch and one of only two purse-seiners in Malta (which didn’t work this year as Malta’s quota was allocated to long-line fishermen).
Bugeja has a direct commercial stake in industrial tuna fishing, but he denies having any conflict of interest. ‘I assist, and speak on the behalf of, the Maltese long-line tuna fishermen all year round, seven days a week,’ he tells me. ‘My main income comes from the tuna farm, but my father and I operate a traditional tuna-fishing boat, and I have other businesses. I believe in diversity.’
The influence of tuna ranching can be seen in the way that Malta has changed its national policy in regard to tuna conservation. Ten years ago, Malta was calling for the establishment of a tuna conservation zone in the central Mediterranean where only small-scale traditional fishing would be allowed. But in a position paper sent to the EU earlier this year, the Maltese government wrote that controls should continue to rest with the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) in order to avoid ‘dual governance of the species’, despite the fact that the ICCAT has so far failed to curb either overfishing or illegal fishing.
In October, ICCAT scientists published a report that suggested that in order to give the tuna a 60 per cent chance of recovery by 2022, next year’s quota should be set ‘between zero and the current 13,500 tonnes’.
WWF lambasted the ICCAT’s apparent willingness to give up on the tuna (‘Would you get on a plane that has a 60 per cent chance of landing safely?’ asks Parkes) and ambiguity on quotas. It suggested that in order to ensure a ‘high probability of species recovery’, the quota needs to be below 6,000 tonnes, and no-fishing zones should be established in half a dozen key spawning grounds.
This will mean, according to Parkes, that the activities of purse seiners and tuna ranches will have to halt, and that the Mediterranean tuna fishery will have to become ‘small-scale’.
December 2010
It’s the peak of the two-month tuna-fishing season for Malta’s long-line fishermen. Windy weather had grounded the Madonna Tal-Hniena, an 18-metre, 22-year-old wooden boat that would look at home in a museum, for three weeks, and now the rush is on: the remaining month will determine the year’s profit or loss for the four-man crew. The bluefin tuna – a fish that those on board profess to loathe – has turned their fishing business into an annual cycle of boom and bust. Never before in the generations-old family fishery business has fishing been such an ordeal.
Charles and his brother Tony learned the trade from their father after they had both dropped out of school. Fishing is the only life they know. ‘I cannot read or write,’ Charles tells me. ‘And I can only talk Maltese. It’s embarrassing when a foreigner speaks on the radio and I can’t even answer back.’
He describes himself as being ‘condemned to this work’.
Industrial scale
For the brothers, the travails of fishing became a condemnation about ten years ago, when the Japanese started scouring the Mediterranean for tuna. That’s also when the purse-seine fishery expanded, and tuna ranches sprouted up around the shores of the western Mediterranean, taking whatever the purse seiners could scoop up in their huge nets.
‘The purse-seine boats locate the fish as they congregate to spawn,’ Charles explains. ‘Then they feed them to make the shoal denser, and typically round up 40 tuna in one sweep of the net.
It takes us an entire season to catch as many fish.’
Scooping the fish out of the sea just before spawning is the antithesis of sustainability, but the money involved – a large tuna, weighing 200 kilograms or more, can fetch about £100,000 in Japan, and the Japanese buy 70 per cent of Malta’s catch – ensures that such considerations are pushed to the side. Tuna fishing has become an industrial operation. Different fleets share notes and employ high-tech detection techniques, including sophisticated sonar equipment, and even send up aircraft to search for shoals of tuna from the air.
The Maltese long-line fishermen, all of whom are small-scale and use hooks, have also been swept along in the scramble. Up to 15 years ago, tuna was just another fish in a varied annual fishing cycle. Back then, Maltese fishermen jointly targeted swordfish and tuna between April and August. ‘On an average two-day trip, we used to catch about eight large swordfish,’ Charles says. ‘We didn’t even directly target tuna then, partly because the demand wasn’t high and partly because the fishing line and hooks we used weren’t strong enough to withstand the struggles of large tuna.’
Yet they still managed to catch about ten 250-kilogram tuna every season. Then the tuna suddenly became very valuable, and it now accounts for at least half of the annual income of Maltese fishermen.
Catch quotas were eventually introduced by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), the body responsible for managing tuna fishing. This was another blow to the Maltese fishermen. The natural capacity of Malta’s tuna long-liners – up to 70 are operational; the exact figure is unclear because some fishermen ‘sell’ their quota – is about 350 tonnes, yet this year’s national quota was only 161 tonnes. For the Madonna Tal-Hniena, the natural capacity 15 years ago – when tuna was a by-catch – was 2,500 kilograms; now its quota is 2,000 kilograms. When I joined the crew, they had already caught 13 fish: the largest weighed 150 kilograms – a fluke nowadays, but a pitifully small tuna by historical standards.
‘In the old times,’ Charles says, ‘we worked in a more relaxed manner and we made more money. We used to continue fishing for swordfish and tuna until the dorado season started in mid-August. I miss fishing in July, when the water is calm. Now we can only sit idly in July because the fishing season is closed.’
Traps and lines
Historically, tuna were caught in the Mediterranean using underwater traps. There are still about two dozen such traditional traps in use in the western Mediterranean (in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Italy), but the decimation of the tuna population has reduced the catches to pitiful levels, and use of the traps is now more of a ritual than a serious fishery. In some cases, the traps have become a tourist attraction, bringing in much-needed income to isolated fishing communities.
Maltese fishers represent the next level up. Commercially viable, yet with limited reach: long-line fishing in smallish launches only gives them the capacity to hook an average of two or three tuna during an entire fishing trip lasting up to two days. This doesn’t mean that all long-line fishing is sustainable, however; it’s a matter of degree. ‘Some long-line fleets targeting tuna are large-scale, industrial vessels,’ Gemma Parkes of WWF Mediterranean points out. ‘So long liners also need to be controlled.’
Controls do exist: long-line fishers can only employ up to 2,000 hooks, even on the large vessels. The Madonna Tal-Hniena has just over 1,000 hooks. These hooks are baited with mackerel and squid and then attached at intervals of about 30 metres apart to the main fishing line, which runs to tens of kilometres in length.
Profitable catch
Back on the Madonna Tal-Hniena, the crew start reeling in the line at around 11pm, having left port at midday and deployed the line throughout the afternoon. The men fish at night because tuna come closer to the surface in the dark. Five hours later, there were three tuna and two swordfish on deck – all relatively small, yet enough to leave a handsome profit.
‘It’s an encouraging catch,’ Charles tells his brother Tony. ‘So we can take a day off tomorrow.’
‘Now is our chance to make some money,’ Tony replies.
Charles turns and sees me studying the prints of saints that hang in the boat’s cabin. The most intriguing depicts a vessel in the foreground and God rising in the background, forming a protective embrace around the boat. ‘We have a lot of saints,’ he says with a chuckle.
The launch, constructed of wood, is stable and durable. Charles keeps it in impeccable shape: every year, he gives it a fresh layer of paint. But it’s sturdiness makes it slow, unwieldy and cumbersome in the water. ‘We were going to get an autopilot,’ Charles says. ‘But how can we justify such a cost when our future seems so uncertain and our income so unpredictable? I think my brother and I are at the end of the line in this family business.’
Tuna troubles
The Atlantic bluefin tuna is divided into two subpopulations in the western and eastern Atlantic. It’s the eastern subpopulation that has been ravaged by overfishing.
The fish are caught after they migrate into the calm, warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea to spawn – scooped up in purse-seine nets and transferred to floating cages that are then towed to tuna ranches. There, the fish are fed for about six months before being slaughtered and sold.
It’s estimated that the breeding population has fallen by about 85 per cent compared with historical levels. And as catch statistics reveal a trend towards ever smaller fish being caught, scientists fear that breeding-age tuna – more than four years old and heavier than 35 kilograms – are being systematically wiped out.
In a bid to control overexploitation, catch quotas are tightening: this year’s quota was 13,500 tonnes, down from 19,950 tonnes in 2009. Monitoring has also been intensified, but illegal fishing is still prevalent, and the true catch is acknowledged to be higher than the quota. Frequent discrepancies between catch and trade statistics are an indication that tuna ranches under-declare the tuna they take in. (The tuna ranches explain these discrepancies by natural growth during the fattening stage, but natural growth isn’t as high as the discrepancies indicate, according to scientists and fishery officials.)
‘Farm capacity is unsustainably high, and the ranches are part of the spiral of overexploitation,’ says Gemma Parkes of WWF. As with other fish farming, there is also the problem of a low biomass conversion ratio: a tuna needs 20 kilograms or more of mackerel to gain an extra kilogram of weight.
In Malta – which has a tuna-ranching capacity of 12,300 tonnes, the world’s highest – tuna fattening has become big business. Tuna now constitute the island’s third-largest export commodity, generating about €100million annually. The tuna ranchers, as well as the purse-seine fishermen, have become millionaires.
In contrast, the Maltese long-line fishermen have seen their work become increasingly difficult, and are no better off, financially, than before. Yet the long-line fishermen don’t have a voice – most can’t even read or write. They are organised into two cooperatives: about 16 are members of the Ghaqda Kooperativa Tas-Sajd, and about 40 belong to the Fishermen Cooperative. The secretary of the former is the owner of a trawler, while the secretary of the latter, Raymond Bugeja, owns a tuna ranch and one of only two purse-seiners in Malta (which didn’t work this year as Malta’s quota was allocated to long-line fishermen).
Bugeja has a direct commercial stake in industrial tuna fishing, but he denies having any conflict of interest. ‘I assist, and speak on the behalf of, the Maltese long-line tuna fishermen all year round, seven days a week,’ he tells me. ‘My main income comes from the tuna farm, but my father and I operate a traditional tuna-fishing boat, and I have other businesses. I believe in diversity.’
The influence of tuna ranching can be seen in the way that Malta has changed its national policy in regard to tuna conservation. Ten years ago, Malta was calling for the establishment of a tuna conservation zone in the central Mediterranean where only small-scale traditional fishing would be allowed. But in a position paper sent to the EU earlier this year, the Maltese government wrote that controls should continue to rest with the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) in order to avoid ‘dual governance of the species’, despite the fact that the ICCAT has so far failed to curb either overfishing or illegal fishing.
In October, ICCAT scientists published a report that suggested that in order to give the tuna a 60 per cent chance of recovery by 2022, next year’s quota should be set ‘between zero and the current 13,500 tonnes’.
WWF lambasted the ICCAT’s apparent willingness to give up on the tuna (‘Would you get on a plane that has a 60 per cent chance of landing safely?’ asks Parkes) and ambiguity on quotas. It suggested that in order to ensure a ‘high probability of species recovery’, the quota needs to be below 6,000 tonnes, and no-fishing zones should be established in half a dozen key spawning grounds.
This will mean, according to Parkes, that the activities of purse seiners and tuna ranches will have to halt, and that the Mediterranean tuna fishery will have to become ‘small-scale’.
December 2010
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