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illegally at night, and questions surrounding why the tonnara had closed. Rais Giacchino

blames the closure of the tonnara to poor local management. Some said it closed for

economic reasons. When I asked Stefano from the MPA he said that it was a bit more

complicated than economics. He explains that when only one proprietor owned the cannery,

the system worked. Under the cooperative system the managing capacity worsened and ‘the

castle collapsed’ (S Donato 2013, pers. comm. 3 July). This had consequences under the new

system of quota allocation. When the tuna quota were assigned to the Sicilian region on the

basis of catch history, the European Community asked Favignana how many tuna they had

caught in the year and ‘because in the previous years they hadn’t had any fish, their answer

was zero, and therefore Favignana was assigned a zero quota’ (S Donato 2013, pers. comm. 3

July). Clearly it was not a good time for weak management or experimentation. The

cooperative model had failed in a period characterised by a gold rush for tuna and for quota,

and by the decline in bluefin in the Mediterranean. And so for almost ten years now there has

been no tuna fishing in Favignana. Most of the tuna that is landed and processed in Italy is

fished by purse seines and comes through the port of Marsala some 15 kilometres away by

sea.

In 2013 in the post tonnara era there were a number of issues at stake (illegal fishing,

livelihoods) that mainly affected small-scale fishermen who fish for a mix of species by

putting nets down in the night and collecting their catch the next day.

Illegal fishing

In 2013 many of the local fishermen I met were angry about the low levels of catch, illegal

fishing, and the MPA's proposed solutions. The current problem in Favignana was not quota,

Stefano had told me, but a problem with industrial fishing (in the case of Favignana, this was

the illegal fishing in the MPA), which in Italy and above all in Sicily is creating a problem of

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