Traditional fishers in Italy fight for right to catch tuna

Tonnare and their ancient practices face extinction as a few big fleets hold the lion's share of quotas and permits

- Sandali Handagama

On an overcast morning, several kilometres off the east coast of Sardinia, four men jump into a net where 49 giant Atlantic bluefin tuna are fighting for their lives.

For more than 30 minutes, the men struggle in a frenzy of nets, tails, fins and sleek silvery bodies before finally securing a metal hook through the gills of the nearest fish. From one of the seven wooden boats that frame this càmira dâ morti ("chamber of death"), Luigi Biggio yells for his men to pull.

As 28 men look on, a majestic creature about three metres long, weighing 120kg is raised out of the water with a pulley. On the biggest boat, one man swiftly cuts its jugular and the vessel fills with blood.

Biggio, 57, runs a tonnara, the Italian version of an ancient Mediterranean fishing custom, which traps and harvests bluefin tuna in the gruesome struggle known in Italy as the mattanza (or "killing"). Biggio comes from a long line of rais (from the Arabic for chief), almost sacred leaders of the hunt - a mantle passed down from father to son in designated families.

"We carry on a tradition that's thousands of years old," Biggio says. "We continue it with pride."

The harvest is violent and can seem barbaric, as the dying tuna are hooked with a gaff, stabbed and hoisted on to boats. However, fishing experts regard it as a rare sustainable method of catching bluefin tuna, one of the world's most overfished species.

Despite its merits, Italy's tonnare face extinction. But they are not disappearing because of a lack of fish. While the practice was threatened in the early 2000s by a collapse in tuna populations due to commercial overfishing, EU regulations have helped recover these numbers over the past decade. But Italy's small-scale and traditional fishers have largely failed to secure permits under successive governments since the start of the quota system, and are now struggling to compete with big fleets.