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Fishery management in the Channel of Sicily 413

vital that there be cooperation in fishing. This exigency was acknowledged in the form of
the General Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean (GFCM), established on 24 September
1949 under the aegis of the FAO. This body, made up of all the coastal countries of the
Mediterranean, has an advisory role for the Mediterranean area as regards development, con-
servation, and rational management of living marine resources. To achieve this aim, the Council
may recommend the use of appropriate measures for regulating fishing methods to its member
states, while seeking to promote community projects for the management and protection of
marine species.

In spite of the obvious need to develop cooperation between countries in the Mediterranean,
the situation remains difficult and fragmentary, characterized by numerous inconsistencies.
All the coastal countries in the Mediterranean adopted the 19 km limit for territorial waters,
except Syria, which in 1981 announced a limit of 56 km, Greece, which maintains a limit of
10 km from the coast, and Turkey, which also has a frontier of 10 km, extending to 19 km
in some stretches. Spain unilaterally instituted an area of fishing protection stretching for
79 km, Malta has extended its exclusive fishing rights to 40 km, and so has Algeria (52 km
to the west and 84 km east of Ras Tenès). In the same way, among the areas declared to be
repopulation areas in open sea, there is the so-called ‘Mammellone’, the fishing area to the
south-west of Lampedusa, over which Tunisia now claims exclusive fishing rights (in part
corresponding to those outlined in the EEZ). Many attempts have been made over the years by
various countries to extend their own territorial waters or EEZs, particularly Croatia, Albania,
and Libya.

Within this scenario, there is the Community’s Common Fisheries Policy, which is divided
into four main areas: the management and preservation of fishing resources, market policy,
structural policy and relations with other countries.

The most recent guidelines of the CFP will be examined, with an in depth look at the contents
of the European Action Plan for the Mediterranean and the technical measures proposed by
the Commission and submitted for academic, political and professional discussion.

2.2 Common Fisheries Policy

The Common Fisheries Policy, whose first measures were adopted in 1970, but were actually
only fine-tuned at the beginning of the 1980s, covers four main areas, in which many legislative
changes have taken place, but in some areas the new laws have hitherto been largely ineffective.
In recent years, the Commission has produced the Green Paper, ‘The Future of the Common
Fisheries Policy’—COM (2001) 135 def. [4] document which outlines the policies of the EU
for the coming years, providing a basis for debate on the CFP reform, which came out in
December 2002. The Green Paper contains the challenges and objectives that Europe must
face in order to regulate the fishing sector.

The questions which concern the Commission are: (1) the alarming state of a large part
of the fishing stock, which has exceeded the biological safety limits; (2) the capacity of the
community fishing fleets, which is far greater than that necessary to sustainably exploit fishing
resources; and (3) the economic fragility of the fishing industry, both in terms of profitability
and in terms of the continual fall in employment. Between 1990 and 1998 alone, a loss of
66 000 jobs was recorded in the fishing ‘catches’ sector, and a fall of 14% in the processing
sector. In addition to this is the fact that in the last decade, the international situation has
changed dramatically, and developing countries now contribute to a greater degree to the
world’s fishery problems, having fully justifiable economic expectations.

Based on the Green Paper, during 2001 the Commission started a vast consultation initiative,
which involved all the interested parties, and more than 300 observations were presented.