Researchers organized interviews with fishing communities with detailed economic policy analysis to open up the effects these actions have on local fishing fleets. Traditional fishermen were being driven from the sea by specific policies that favor larger boats and richer owners.
The study examined the valid use of adopting marine resources from traditional users, through policies and governance systems that aids large-scale fisheries, and other activities such as marine conservation for ecotourism.
Also, inadequate safeguards around informal recreational fishing meant that the pressures on exposed fish stocks such as scorpionfish, red seabream, mullets, and other prestigious fisheries has actually intensified.
EU policy focuses too much on fish stock maintenance and has no meaningful policy regulations to ensure that quotas for over-fished stock such as tuna are equitably shared amongst fishermen. This allows individual nations to implement their own policies. Furthermore, additional preservation measures such as no fishing zones are crude and tend to curtail all fishing activity over large segments of coastal waters, regardless of whether the fishing undertaken there is sustainable or not.
The research, has been discussed among key government officers, reaching as high as the Prime Minister of Malta and a major reallocation of quotas for tuna and other commercially important species to the traditional fishing fleet has been promised.
The research will be presented to the Ministers of the Mediterranean who will meet in Malta for a High-level Ministerial Conference on 25th and 26th September to discuss the issues of small-scale fisheries sustainability, and hopes that this will bring positive change in the governance of fisheries in the Mediterranean region.