Until recently, Gamal Ahmed Gamal had made a living working the fields of the northern Nile Delta, and — like his father and many generations before him — he assumed he always would.
But over the past decade, conditions deteriorated bit by bit: Saltier soil shrank his wheat yields and caused his trees to wither. When his lone cow developed skin ailments from wallowing in brackish groundwater, Gamal knew it was over. In 2017, he took up a cousin’s offer of a berth on his boat and joined a crew of rookie fishermen working out of the Egyptian port of Rosetta.
Life at sea has not been much kinder to Gamal — or to his fellow new arrivals, many of whom also turned to the profession as a last resort.
No one’s catching much, not least because of the increased competition. No one’s selling much, either. With the fishermen increasingly unable to support their families, the mood among those who gather each morning at the docks is grim.
“We see the sea as a blessing, something that will always give us a living,” Gamal said. “But it’s not doing that at the moment, and now we are all suffering.”
Rosetta is not the only Mediterranean fishing port struggling to survive. A combination of devastating environmental changes and geopolitical strife has made life increasingly precarious for the region’s fishing communities.
Warming waters and shrinking fish stocks have pushed fishermen to sail farther afield or be less discriminating as to where they drop their nets. Some have become caught in the crosshairs of territorial disputes as a result: Libyan authorities have repeatedly seized Italian fishermen who sail into contested waters.
Even if the region’s politics were to become more stable, the worsening effects of climate change will likely leave fishermen struggling. The Mediterranean is warming fast; one study last year showed temperature increases in the area had already hit 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The Mediterranean fishermen’s difficulties could therefore be a harbinger of things to come around the world, experts say.
“The Mediterranean is like a miniature ocean,” said Marta Coll, a senior researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona. “It’s like a miniature laboratory to analyze what’s going to happen in other parts of the world.”
The issues plaguing the Mediterranean’s fishermen are partly due to its unique geography. As a semi-enclosed sea, with a lone portal to the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar, it’s acutely vulnerable to everything from plastic pollution to excessive nutrient richness, known as eutrophication. The densely populated coastal regions also include some of the planet’s biggest per-capita consumers of fish.
In recent years, those vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by the cumulative effects of climate change and other shocks, including overfishing, which together have had dire consequences for the region’s fish stocks.
Nevertheless, in some countries, especially crisis-ravaged nations in North Africa and the Levant, people are still turning to fishing as employment prospects onshore deteriorate. (In others, like Greece, fishing fleets have declined.)
The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) found that while the number of fishing vessels in the Mediterranean and Black seas has stagnated overall in the last two years, several countries — including Algeria, Egypt and Libya — reported an increase of more than 15 percent each. Tiny Lebanon, for example, hosts over 2,000 active fishing vessels, a figure that local fishermen say is climbing as the country’s economy crumbles.
But, like the fishermen of Rosetta, many find the work less reliable than they had hoped. In some places, such as Egypt, they face growing competition from inland aquaculture; in others, such as Lebanon, economic downturns and the coronavirus pandemic have led to a drop in demand.
Many have seen the size of their catch dwindle — one study concluded the number of fish in the Mediterranean has declined by more than a third in the past 50 years — and the fish themselves are also changing.
With the Mediterranean warming 20 to 30 percent faster than the global average, much of the food on which fish rely is dying off, causing fish to get thinner and smaller. A number of native fish species, such as monkfish, are at risk of eventually disappearing.
“What’s happening is that these fish in higher temperatures have a higher energy requirement, a higher metabolism, so their demand for food is higher,” said Miguel Bernal, senior fisheries officer at the GFCM. “If they can’t find it they are in a worse condition. They are outside their optimal temperature range.”
Rampant overfishing in coastal areas and changing currents due to warming waters are also changing fishing patterns, making catches less predictable.