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local products. These changes have led to a reduction in seasonal employment opportunities;

the undermining of fishing knowledge and authority; and a declining local tuna organ

economy, along with its cultural practice, financial opportunity and system that deals with

waste from the bluefin industry.

The presence of the tuna cage has thus polarised the community and stirred many

environmental campaigners. For some, it functions as a symbol of the rapid changes that have

taken place in the previous three years, including the decline of the mattanza, local traditions,

tuna supply and tastes. For others the cage and fattening ranches represent the only possibility

for the tonnara to continue within wider environmental, political and commercial constraints.

For restaurateur Secondo Borghero the tonnara made a choice to sell the live tuna to the

Spanish and:

It’s a big problem. The tuna is not just the flesh but also the interior—the stomach,
the heart, the eggs—and now we don’t have the quantity of these and the quality
around is also not great. (2013, pers. comm. 19 June)

The tensions are not just about the lack of tuna organs but generally the absence of

tuna coming to the island. From my interviews and informal chats with restaurant owners

there emerged a sense that the community has been hard done by. A recurrent complaint was

that the tonnara does not leave enough tuna to supply local restaurants or the community, and

as well the tonnara charges too much. These conflicts relate to business management but also

to the financial sustainability of the tonnara under pressure from fishery regulation and

competition with industrial fisheries. From the point of view of owners, the locals demand

too small a price and are out of touch with what tuna costs to harvest through the tonnara.

One of the responses has been that the tonnara supplies a small portion of tuna each year to

the elderly members of the community to acknowledge their past contributions to the

tonnara. Yet, according to Salvatorre and Bruno, this is simply a way to placate them rather

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