Values: topping up retirement income, love of the sea.
The disillusioned fisher is typically an ageing man, around 50-60 years old or older. He is from a small to medium sized coastal community in any one of the EU sea basins. He owns a small vessel (<12 m) in which he has not invested in a long time, uses a variety of passive gears (like hooks and lines) and targets various species. He sells his catch to those he knows well in his network and is in direct contact with, and keeps the odd fish for his own consumption.
With basic education and much learned on the job from other fishers when he was younger, he has fished for a living all his life, enjoying it and accumulating knowledge, but knowing nothing else. Over the years he has become a powerless witness of the degradation of resources and the decline of his profession. He has seen the sector become increasingly regulated and finds the paperwork and new rules so burdensome and disproportionate for his small- scale operation, at times even overwhelming, that he sometimes decides not to comply with them. For him this situation is even more frustrating as he knows what fishing sustainably means but feels squeezed out of his fishing space by 'conservation' initiatives and other ‘blue’ developments.
His love of the sea, his area, and the job itself have kept him where he is, and he has earned respect from his peers over the years, but he is only moderately engaged in community affairs. He feels unable to pass on his knowledge to younger folks, who struggle to enter the profession or are not interested in doing so. He is voiceless because he’s not a member of a producer association.
Now that he is nearing retirement age or has retired, he relies on part-time fishing for his income or to supplement his pension. For him, the value of fishing comes mainly from the top-up income it generates to help him make ends meet, and from the pleasure he gets when he’s at sea, but he knows he is in a vulnerable economic situation with little hope for improvement. He is sceptical of state help, and has no one else to rely upon.
This list of fishers’ profiles today is not exhaustive. It is meant to capture a broad range of characteristics in order to inform the next phases of the project. Possible profiles of future fishers will be published at the end of the study.
