A declining activity in freshwater areas

The most important fishing activity takes place in the Mediterranean Sea while the freshwater fishing shows a continuous decline. Fishing is an ancestral economic activity in the Mediterranean, performed both for subsistence and commercial purpose. The SPA/RAC estimates the production at 1.5-1.7 million tons caught per year, with 85% of the catch attributable to only 6 countries: Italy, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Tunisia and Algeria. Still, this satisfies only one third of the Mediterranean demand.
 
However, most available information and statistics focus on marine fisheries (often including coastal lagoons), whilst fisheries in wetlands do not receive much attention. One reason is probably that unlike sea fisheries, they usually occur on subsistence rather than commercial/ industrial scale. Therefore, despite being a very valuable activity in many Mediterranean wetlands, only fragmentary and local statistics exist (n° of fishermen, amount of fish caught…), and an overall overview is not possible.
 
Like any other exploitation of natural wetland resources, fishing can be either sustainable or non-sustainable.

• Over-fishing can cause the local extinction of some species. This may in turn lead to secondary, negative impacts like the introduction of alien fish species in order to compensate for the lost ones.
• Depending on the techniques used, fishing can also be a cause of heavy mortality of other animals, e.g. Terrapins or aquatic mammals caught incidentally in gillnets.
• Finally, fish-eating animals (e.g. pelicans, cormorants, seals, herons…) are still sometimes seen as competitors and illegally destroyed, although this tends to disappear in the Mediterranean. However, recent increases of cormorants populations such as in Israel and Albania revive tensions with fishermen and fish farm managers.