EUROPEAN DIARY:THE FISH market in Sicily's second city, Catania, has been there almost as long as the city itself. Nestled 100 metres away from Catania's beautiful cathedral, the pescheria literally throbs with energy as fishmongers cry out to attract shoppers to their silvery produce, writes JAMIE SMYTH.
Buckets of squid lie glistening in the midday sun next to heaps of mackerel replete with their distinctive rainbow colourings. Sea bass, anchovy, sea urchins and every other manner of sea creature is on offer to customers willing to tiptoe through pools of water and fish scales to buy fish fresh from the trawler.
But the eye-catching stalls are the ones that stock big fish. Tuna and swordfish are the kings of the Mediterranean and fishmongers expertly carve thick steaks from the huge fish, which can weigh up to 700kg (eight normal-sized men). Catania's market just wouldn't be the same without the huge tuna and swordfish heads staring out from stalls.
But that is fast becoming a danger, says the European Commission, which through the EU common fisheries policy is the guardian of Europe's seas. Last week the commission issued a stark warning to EU fishing fleets in Italy, France, Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Malta not to overfish bluefin tuna, which are the biggest species of tuna and whose population is collapsing in the Mediterranean and worldwide.
"Our position for 2008 is zero tolerance and we intend to do all we can this year to prevent overfishing. There is a huge risk that there will be overfishing again this year," said the commission, referring to several EU states which overshot their bluefin quotas in 2007.
Last November the commission took all seven states with bluefin fisheries to court for overfishing and issued legal proceedings against Italy and France for having inadequate controls to ensure that overfishing and illegal fishing do not take place.
The overfishing came despite the EU's endorsement of a 15-year recovery plan for bluefin, agreed in 2006 by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the body that manages the global bluefin fishery.
The EU's tuna fleet is so large and its activity is so concentrated in May and June that the fleets could exhaust the bluefin quota in just two days of fishing. The environmental organisation WWF, which campaigns against fishing for bluefin in the Mediterranean, warned this week that the fleets were catching 10,000 tuna every day since the start of the fishing season this month.
By the end of this month, 27,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna, which are currently migrating from the Atlantic to breeding zones throughout the Mediterranean, will have been caught - close to the 29,500 tonne annual allowable catch, according to WWF scientists.
"The bluefin tuna over-exploitation is untenable and unjustifiable," says Dr Sergi Tudela, head of fisheries at WWF Mediterranean, who is calling for the EU to end bluefin fishing immediately. "Scientists are telling us the tuna stocks cannot support such high levels of catches, and pirate fishing has already been detected by WWF this year."
WWF has a point. Scientists from the international tuna commission have indicated that the maximum sustainable EU bluefin catch in the Mediterranean should be 15,000 tonnes per year, which is less than what has been caught in the first weeks of this fishing season and half the EU's annual quota.
Lobbying by EU member governments, which came under pressure from their fishing communities, forced the quota to the 29,500 level. And even when these quotas are agreed with the commission - as was the case for bluefin last year - fishing fleets regularly breach their limits, putting the sustainability of future stocks in danger.
With a single bluefin tuna reaching prices of $100,000 (€63,000) due to huge demand from the sushi-loving Japanese, illegal fishing is also a problem. This month the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise located the Italian trawler Diomede II using illegal driftnets to fish bluefin off the coast of Sicily.
"We use radar to locate vessels fishing illegally and in this case we confiscated their nets and escorted them back to port," Greenpeace oceans campaigner Karli Thomas told The Irish Times from aboard the Arctic Sunrise.
Greenpeace criticises the EU for using taxpayers' money to pay a host of subsidies (vessel renewal and fuel subsidies) that enables the tuna fleet to continue fishing. It also notes that enforcement of EU fishing policy is in the hands of EU states, which often bow to local pressure rather than crack down on fishermen.
But overfishing of tuna is now having a dramatic impact on coastal communities in Sicily and all across the Mediterranean. Scores of tuna fisheries have had to close in Sicily and its traditional "La Mattanza" tuna fishing spectacle in June, during which local fisherman herd hundreds of tuna into a netted area to be impaled by spears, is under threat, says Alessandro Giani, a Greenpeace campaigner living in Sicily.
"Overfishing is already causing a loss of jobs, knowledge and culture and very soon bluefin tuna could be commercially extinct and no fishing will be possible," he says.
Back in Catania's market the last of the tuna steaks are being sold as the sun sets on another day's trading. Whether bluefin tuna will still be on the menu in years to come could depend on what happens during coming fishing seasons and whether the EU executive is finally able to make national authorities take effective enforcement action.