On Monday 15 July, the NGO Oceana revealed, by analysing satellite data, that fishing vessels operated for 28,000 hours in protected areas that are closed to fishing in the Mediterranean.
The conclusions of this analysis will be presented at the meeting of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) being held this week in Tirana, Albania. The analysis is based on the Global Fishing Watch fisheries detection algorithm and examined data covering the whole of 2018.
The most worrying cases concern more than 14,000 hours of apparent fishing by 56 bottom trawlers in three restricted fishery areas in the Strait of Sicily. Since 2017, trawling has been prohibited in these areas, which are used as nurseries for young hake and deepwater prawns.
Unauthorised fishing operations have also been observed in the waters of several Mediterranean countries, including Libya (4,400 hours), Tunisia (1,900 hours), Syria (80 hours), Albania (780 hours), Montenegro (1,800 hours) and Egypt (390 hours). Oceana was unable to verify whether these activities were legal or not, due to the lack of transparency of access agreements between countries. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)