The fingers of Ahmed’s left hand were covered in cuts as he sat in a café in August on the Tunisian archipelago of Kerkennah. The palm tree-dotted islands resting in the blue waters of the Mediterranean are known for fishing, but also for migration to Italy and the two intersect.
Ahmed, 17, the son of an octopus fisherman, had put his hand through a window the night before because his parents wouldn’t let him pilot a boat to Lampedusa an Italian island that lies nearer the African coast than mainland Italy and has attracted a surge in migrant arrivals.
I drive the boat with my dad, so why not? Ahmed said. When I am here, I am frustrated, I am angry, I want to leave.
Young men with some knowledge of the sea like Ahmed have come to play an important role in the recent exodus. They pilot small boats, which are usually destined for fishing, on a one-way journey to Italy, unlike the boats in previous years that would return to Tunisia after delivering larger groups of up to 100 passengers.
Years of declining yields have strained the financial viability of the fishing industry on Kerkennah, and all along the Tunisian coast. Fishermen on the islands told The New Humanitarian that fish are smaller, less abundant, and further away from the coast now than they were in the past a trend that has accelerated over the past decade.
This is consistent with an overall decline in the population of fisheries in the Mediterranean since the 1990s. Seventy-eight percent of fish stocks in the sea are over-exploited or depleted, including tuna, hake, and red mullet, according to a 2018 report by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization.
At the same time, Tunisia is experiencing a long and grinding economic crisis that has worsened recently due to the coronavirus pandemic a situation that has been pushing more and more people to migrate.
Tunisian migration had until recently been overshadowed by much larger numbers of people departing from Libya, but Tunisia now rivals Libya as the main point of departure. So far this year, more than 8,400 Tunisians have crossed the Mediterranean by boat to Italy accounting for over 40 percent of arrivals compared to just over 2,600 in all of 2019.
The organisers of these journeys offer high prices for fishing boats, and they allow young fishermen who don’t see a future in the country to migrate for free if they’re willing to pilot the vessels across the sea.
Smuggling has benefited from the fishing crisis, Romdhane Ben Amor, communications officer at the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights [FTDES], a non-governmental organisation, told TNH. They [the organisers] have an easy boat; they have the driver of the boat with all the knowledge the hours, the weather, everything. It is a sector in crisis, so it is easy to take advantage of.
The arrival of blue crab to the waters near Tunisia sometime around 2013 has also created major problems. It is an invasive species in the Mediterranean with no known predators and a high reproductive rate that destroys fishing nets and crowds out local species. Tunisian fishermen have nicknamed it Daesh, the Arabic acronym of the so-called Islamic State, because of the damage it is causing.
It’s a terrorist, Mahdi Hajj Sessi, a 39-year-old fisherman from Kerkennah, told TNH. It leaves nothing. It eats the fish, the shrimp; it destroys the net; it destroys everything.
On top of this, as Tunisia’s unemployment rate climbs currently it’s at 18 percent overall and 36 percent among youth more people are turning to fishing as a way to earn a bit of money while out of work, increasing competition for the sea’s declining resources. It might not bring in much, but it’s instant cash, explained Azzedine.
The New Humanitarian