"To achieve maximum sustainable catch" is the self-declared goal of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT). In the Mediterranean this has been interpreted as "catch as many as you can while it lasts" by tuna cowboys.
In past years it was not unheard of for an individual tuna to weigh 700 kg. A tuna caught today weighs much less, averaging only about 100 kg. The constant drop in average weight of the catch year after year is a clear sign that the Atlantic bluefin is in serious decline.
In 2001 a Maltese delegation at a meeting of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean called for purse seiners to be banned from a 75,000 square mile zone south east of Malta through which potential spawning stock migrate.
They claimed that the spreading practice of purse seining and towing tuna to fixed pens was causing havoc among longliners. Fishermen who use the more conservative longline were suffering great losses.
Last October scientists went public with the news that catches of Mediterranean bluefin tuna in recent years have been over three times the maximum sustainable yield.
At a meeting held last November in Dubrovnik, the 40 countries that are contracting parties to the ICCAT agreed in principle to a 15-year recovery plan to rebuild stocks. But when it came to a recommendation to halve the European catch, EU ministers rejected the allocations as too low at the insistence of both Malta and Italy.
The EU appears to have gone out of its way to maintain high quotas to help a few rich industrial-scale fishermen, putting short-term commercial interest above long-term conservation concerns.
National quota
During an ICCAT session in Tokyo last January, the Maltese government baulked at the 173-tonne limit recommended for Malta. Then reeled in a quota of 355 tonnes. Assigned by the EU and the ICCAT for the first time this year, this is equivalent to the highest catches ever, not seen again in Malta since the mid-Nineties.
In previous years, Malta did not have a specific quota. A slightly lower catch allocation of 344 tonnes was then based on Malta's declared catches for 1993 and 1994, just before the tuna fishery peaked.
According to a ministry spokesman, Malta's "rigorous management in the tuna fishery in past years and its fulfilling all the criteria" were a positive factor in complex negotiations to hammer out the national quota.
The EU Fisheries Commission assigned Malta a higher ceiling for bluefins than Greece and Cyprus. All governments were to agree to bring down their national catch figure. Malta must reduce its catch by 20 per cent within the next three years.
A drop-off in bluefin landings after 1995 was blamed, by the Fisheries Department, on a "large presence of foreign tuna purse seiners just off the Maltese Islands". Subsequent reductions in the declared size of landings by several fishing nations were regarded as "questionable" by the ICCAT and put down to underreporting.
Strict requirements for reporting landed tuna are difficult to enforce when live bluefins are transferred to pens. Tuna penning has so far slipped by largely unregulated, falling between the definition of fishery and aquaculture. In true aquaculture, the fish are raised from eggs, not moved from one place to another to be fattened. Under new regulations nations must now control all captures and transfers, not just the landing of caught fish.
The Fisheries Department has released figures for bluefin catches for 2006 and 2007 respectively as 263 and 329 tonnes. Tuna caught by Malta-flagged vessels and sold to local tuna farms this season amounted to 190 tonnes.
Fishery statistics given by a ministry spokesman point to an increase in total catch between this year and last year of over 20 per cent. Yet National Statistic Office figures for this year and last of tuna brought ashore (gutted before weighing at the government fish market) disclose a drop of 40 per cent in Pixkerija landings compared to last year.
This may reflect the fact that Maltese purse seiners are squeezing out the more sustainable longline fishers by netting tuna for transfer to the pens, where they are mixed with other bluefins caught under a foreign flag. More than half the total Maltese tuna catch was sold live to local tuna pen operators this year for a higher price than the local market might offer.
Almost all the tuna being held in pens in Malta was trapped on the high seas of the Mediterranean this season by fishing boats registered in other countries. Only about three per cent of the tuna captured and transferred to pens in Maltese waters fall under the national quota. The rest are purchased from fishing vessels of other countries.
Partnerships
The documented depletion of the species, soaring value of raw tuna on the Japanese market and impending changes in regulatory mechanisms drove tuna cowboys to fish at full gallop.
This year tuna ranches dotted around our coastline are holding an estimated 5,000 tonnes of wild tuna, 2,000 tonnes more than last year. They have been towed from the open sea in nets to calmer waters for fattening and eventual re-export this winter.
Maltese tuna penners load their cages in May-July and market the fish from October to January, taking advantage of peak demand over the end-of-year holiday season. Captured during the breeding season, the prized fish are fed on a diet of mackerel and herring to raise their oil content and fetch a higher price.
Maltese and Spanish partners entered a joint holding in 1999 with a Japanese company, which specialises in the marketing of bluefin tuna on the Asian market. Last year Azzopardi Fisheries, operators of pens in St Paul's Bay and off Comino, set up another company running a bluefin tuna pen near Limassol in Cyprus.
For a kilometre or more around the holding pens, depending on the wind, an oily slick floats on the surface, pointing to a fishy presence wherever tuna ranches operate.
Draft policy
To produce just one kilo of meat the tuna need to be given 10-25 kg of feed every day. This has led to increased pressure on feed fish stock. Sea grass, a key marine species, is also very sensitive to waste and pharmaceutical residues from fish farms.
A draft policy on aquaculture in 2002 raised the alarm, warning that there were too many fish farm applications, adding that relocation to an offshore zone was "difficult". It ranked the activity as a "critical" over-exploitation of natural resources, worse than bird hunting.
The report identified the need to establish the carrying capacity of habitats where tuna penning was proposed, and tagged the Fisheries Department and the Environment Protection Department within MEPA as responsible. It concluded that impacts were not easily reversed, and all tuna pens should be adequately studied for long-term effects, while monitoring results should not just be shelved but proper proposals made.
The draft national policy hinted that management regulations had not been very effective in limiting catches in the Mediterranean sea, where significant misreporting was suspected. The authorities were advised to ensure that quantities caged are consistent with the reported catches of each fishing vessel by checking their logbooks.
Multi-national fleet
It takes 35 days for tug boats to tow pens filled with live tuna to Malta from Sardinian waters, where Italian purse seiners operating out of Salerno hunt the fish down and transfer them to the transit pens.
Purse seiners from Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Croatia have all used Malta as a base to fish in North African waters. Tuna pens operate in all these countries, as well as in Turkey. Purse seiners still under French control have been reflagged in Libya.
In 2004 pilots flying out of Libya reported tuna spotter planes of French, Spanish and Libyan origin flying illegally in the month of June, with the consent of Libyan authorities.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has alleged that most of the fish in Malta's tuna farms comes from Libyan waters "where over-fishing and underreporting are the rule". The Maltese government has always denied claims that tuna illegally caught in Libyan waters was being transferred to tuna farms in its waters or that tuna spotter planes were being flown out of Malta. The airport reportedly does not keep information on the operations of the planes that land in Malta.
According to the WWF, a June ban on the use of planes to spot tuna was again defied last month. An Italian fleet of industrial tuna fishing vessels left Malta after the season closed on July 1 to catch tuna off Sicily, supported by a spotter plane. The ICCAT has called for an extension of the spotter plane ban to cover the whole year.
Over-quota laundering
The development of new and powerful fishing fleets, and a loophole allowing illegal unreported catches, have been inching the bluefin tuna fishery closer to collapse for over a decade. The Mediterranean is thought to have one of the highest rates of illegal tuna fishing in the world.
The practice of tuna penning has been identified as a possible bypass for quotas assigned to fishing vessels of different countries. During a 2005 review of fisheries data, the ICCAT noted the harmful effects of tuna farming on catch statistics, a result of a series of unmonitored transhipments of the catch.
Malta claims that its fishery abides by ICCAT regulations. Yet the government does not exclude that "some Maltese fishermen may be hiring foreign ships to avoid national quota restrictions". In an environment of over-capacity and high economical interests, it is difficult to completely avoid misreporting catch figures and fraud.
A search for information, independent of today's commercial fisheries, by the European scientific programme STROMBOLI, revealed that historical records of traditional tuna trap catches since the 16th century averaged a yield of around 15,000 tonnes over centuries of bluefin migration through the Mediterranean sea.
On this basis, experts have recommended that the current reported catch of 32,000 tonnes should be at least halved. Yet this season's total catch quota was still high at 29,500 tonnes, to be reduced to 25,500 tonnes in 2010.
Libya warms to ICCAT plan
In May 2005 Libya, without any consultation, suddenly expanded its fishing zone to 62 miles. In an address to the UN on the Law of the Sea, Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said that the unilateral decision could jeopardise other states' traditional fishing practices. Libya further distanced itself from the ICCAT and the EU with its rejection of a bluefin recovery plan earlier this year.
In April 2007, EU ministers agreed that illegal fishing activities are the greatest threat to ocean fish stocks, and that the fight against illegal fishing must be intensified. Control systems were urgently drawn up to ensure that fish imported into the EU originates from legal catches. High penalties and trade sanctions were envisaged for third countries which tolerate illegal activities of vessels flying their flags.
A member of the EU fisheries committee, Green MEP Marie-Helene Aubert, wrote to Commisioner Borg in April pressing him to prohibit EU vessels from fishing in Libyan waters, and ban imports from Libya until the plan was adopted by that country.
Just before the season opened this year, Libya had a change of heart, deciding to adopt measures to ensure the marketability of its catch, and agreed to abide by the ICCAT bluefin recovery plan.
Delayed regulations
A serious global problem, the unreported, unregulated and illegal fishing industry is said to be worth between US$4 and $9 billion a year. A clampdown on unreported catches and quota evasion in the Mediterranean is expected to relieve some of the pressure on an already over-exploited fishery if effectively enforced.
All landings of bluefin tuna or transfers to cages will now be subject to prior notification and strict control measures. If there is any inconsistency in the information concerning the fish at any stage in the chain, the farm state is required either to stop the transfer or to seize and release the fish already transferred back into the sea.
Up until 2006, it was the flag state that had sole responsibility for monitoring and controlling the activity of vessels flying its flag.
At present the Fisheries Department relies on tuna pen operators for catch data. The tuna are counted by filming them underwater as they swim from the purse seine capture net to the netted enclosure of the holding pen.
Following bitter opposition from France and Italy, the vote on quotas was postponed until May. Losing patience, the European Commission herded the sparring nations towards agreement by threatening to ban tuna fishing for a whole season unless the recovery plan was approved.
These two powerful fishing nations refused to agree to the recovery plan unless rules on protection of juveniles, setting a firm limit on the size that can be landed, were put on ice for another year.
At this point, Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries Francis Agius expressed his lack of credibility for the EU with regard to sustainable fisheries. The minimum allowed landing weight for Mediterranean tuna was actually increased, from a previously recommended 10 kg, to 30 kg. The plan did not come into force until the season was nearly over.
The recovery plan is considered too weak by observers who are urging a radical overhaul at the next ICCAT meeting in Turkey this November. Member states and the European Parliament will then debate long-term implementation of the plan at the end of the year.
Commissioner Borg has said that the ICCAT may revise the recovery plan at any moment on the basis of new scientific advice or weaknesses detected in its implementation.