I Padroni Delle Onde – Masters Of The Waves

Being a fisherman in a scenario of a field already strongly challenged by a long-standing crisis, has now become more complicated than ever.
In Puglia, the scarcity of marine resources, the insufficient policies to support fishermen and the collapse in prices (fish imports now cover over 70% of demand) have led in the past 10 years to a 30% reduction in the fleet and in production. In addition, the Apulian fishermen are faced with the European regulations that protect fish stocks, created more for the impressive Atlantic fishing fleets rather than those of the Mediterranean, which are made up of small boats with few crew members.
In particular, the law decree 154/2016, which provides for fines of up to 150,000 EUR and the withdrawal of licenses for those who do not respect the measures established by Brussels for fish and the size of trawl nets, would be, according to the fishermen, incompatible with the characteristics of the Adriatic Sea, and would make it impossible to draw fish in local waters.

Being a category that can fish three / four days a week and only if weather permits , that has no state paid salaries in case of company difficulties and that has to share the ever narrower resources with countries with much more permissive fishing rules, life becomes increasingly hard : in a sea whose biological balance is deeply influenced by human activities on the ground and by climate change, the coming horizon is increasingly uncertain.