The ongoing investigation into the widespread and systematic tuna racket is the biggest scandal to dog the fishing sector for years. But the industry has been making the news for the wrong reasons for years now. Whether it’s the massive illicit trade and contraband operations, the slime from tuna farms fouling the coast or the severe overfishing, the overall picture is of an industry that has been overtaken by profit-driven, piratic tendencies. 

Beyond the headlines lies the wider story of a sector that has metamorphosed in the past 15 years. It has gone from being a traditional and cultural activity that runs down the generations in families to an industry driven by big business operators whose sole affinity is with profit. It is a metamorphosis that is seen most dramatically in the so-called ‘tuna ranching industry’: the capture of live tuna which are then fattened in cages and exported, mostly to Japan.

There is big money in the highly-prized Bluefin tuna. Malta’s tuna ranching industry, the largest in the world, is calculated to generate over €120 million annually. And this relatively easy money has, at an individual and national scale, been blinding us to the ravages of Bluefin tuna ranching. Its unsustainability and unethicality is underscored by the low feed conversion ratio: tuna are fed at least 20kgs of edible pelagic fishes such as mackerel and herring to gain 1kg of ‘fattened’ flesh that’s sought by its consumers. This demand for pelagic fishes has also had an impact on other fisheries, directly and indirectly, especially because pelagic species are overfished in the Mediterranean.

The ranching industry, which sources tuna from purse seine net fishers, has also indirectly put pressure on the traditional longline fishery. More than half of Malta’s longline tuna fishers have folded, or been paid to disband, because of overfishing caused by the tuna-ranching industry.

The progression to industrial-scale operations can also be seen in trawling, a fishery that’s particularly destructive because of possible damage to the seabed and the high proportion of discards (the half or more of the catch that is inedible is discarded back into the sea; a mass of marine life that would be dead by the time it’s discarded). Yet the number of trawling fishers permitted by the Fisheries Department has grown fourfold to 12 in the past 15 years or so. 

Even in nearshore fishing by trammel nets, the trend has been for concentration of the fishery into fewer hands. Trammel net fishery remains the commonest fishery among small-scale fishermen working singly or in pairs, but now around 20 fishers have grown into more intensive operations. Traditional fishers used to deploy up to 10 nets of 150 metres long with every daily fishing effort in season; the intensive operators employ imported labour to typically deploy 50 nets almost round the clock. 

This intensive fishing causes greater overfishing and environmental damage, and elbows out the family-run, smaller-scale fishermen whose efforts yield diminishing catches and returns. Many of the lone, smaller fishermen have now taken to augmenting their income by ferrying tourists around Marsaxlokk Bay and the Delimara peninsula.

In this beleaguered atmosphere, fishermen are losing more control of their operating space and their voice. Bona fide fishermen feel disenfranchised from decisions that affect them and, as they have told this newspaper, even feel that they have lost their voice in the consultative Fisheries Board.

The wider loss to society includes extensive damage to the marine environment and cultural impoverishment of an entire way of life of fishing communities, which are dying out, or the loss of Marsaxlokk as a colourful, living fishermen’s community. More consequentially, in the long term all of us as consumers shall be increasingly at the mercy of concentration of fishing operations into fewer hands: concentration of economic power or resources often leads to price-fixing and other seller’s market practices.

Quality of product is another casualty. Let’s not forget that the reason why the tuna racket was uncovered was because consumers started reported instances of food poisoning after consuming tuna improperly refrigerated during transport. Moreover, we are incrementally losing the freshness of the product that was guaranteed – and still is to some extent – when small-time fishermen went out to sea and returned to our villages hawking fishes so fresh they would still be gasping for air. This is becoming an increasingly rare sight.

There has been much indignation among fishermen at the revelations of the scale of the tuna racket, estimated at €12 million annually, which has caused much reputational damage to Malta.

The scale of the racket also raises serious questions about systematic failures of enforcement entities and complacency at the political level – politicians have been alerted to understaffing of enforcement personnel for a considerable time and the talk in Parliament that it is not easy to find personnel sounds rather hollow. The government cannot, in these circumstances, dodge political responsibility for the situation.

Now the forlorn hope is that the government will take this opportunity to shake up the fishing industry in the long-term interests of fishermen, culture, environment and consumers.

This is a Times of Malta print editorial