The impact of the EU's common fisheries policy on the Maltese fisheries sector

Abstract

Fisheries may not be the first thing to think of when reflecting about the issues that the European Union (EU) deals with. However, throughout the years the EU has issued a conglomeration of fisheries regulations, with the main one being the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Having said this, with EU membership Malta was obliged to adapt its national fisheries legislation to the CFP and its related regulations. Hence, a sector to which Malta lost jurisdiction was that of fisheries, and it must be said that EU accession had brought extensive changes to the fishing industry. Furthermore, adapting to the EU' s fisheries standards was not a simple process. On the one hand, opposition against some restrictions never lacked. For instance, in some occasions fishermen had also organised protests. On the other side, from an administrative point of view, adapting to the CFP was of a challenge due to lack of experience and the small administrative capacity. Having said all this, the aims of this research are to analyse the impact of the EU' s CFP on the Maltese fisheries by focusing on the main changes witnessed by the same industry, and to analyse why difficulties were encountered in adapting to the EU's CFP. In doing so, at the heart of the methodology is a qualitative analysis where a document analysis is applied together with interviews. These were crucial at arriving to answers to the research questions, and the results show that as demonstrated above, EU accession brought with it extensive changes to the Maltese fisheries sector, and furthermore, that some difficulties were encountered in adapting to the EU's CFP. Finally, it must be said that EU membership brought both pros and cons. If on the one hand, fishermen may have been impacted negatively with some restrictions, these restrictions were imposed on them for the sustainability of the same industry. Furthermore, another very great benefit was EU funding, were Malta has had the opportunity to modernize its fishing fleet and control centres, and benefit from mutual assistance for control and surveillance- among other benefits.