Traditional fishing on Tunisia’s Kerkennah archipelago is gentle, quiet, eco-friendly and pollution free.
The method, called charfia, is distinct enough to be recognized by UNESCO as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Long barriers made of palm fronds are embedded vertically in shallow water and the sides of the barrier gradually come together, directing the fish into a trap. Imagine a Y, with the trap at the very bottom of the letter.
On an early, breezy morning in late May, Omar Joulak, a 22-year-old Tunisian who works the charfia owned by his uncle, Abderrazak Joulak, demonstrated to my interpreter and me how the system works. We drove to an uninhabited bay in Kerkennah and waded to a wooden fishing boat anchored just offshore in clear water.
The “Mona” was only 5.2 metres long, with a white hull and turquoise deck. The small outboard motor seemed an afterthought; the boat was mainly pushed by Omar from the stern or eased forward from the deck, using an oar-like wooden pole.
The 'Mona,' anchored offshore in an uninhabited bay in Kerkennah. Behind the boat is the charfia, which begins at the beach and extends some 300 metres into the bay.
One side of the charfia began at the beach and extended some 300 metres into the bay, as if it were a narrow hedge growing in the water. The other side, in the shape of an arc, began closer to the traps.
The curious mix of shapes is based on the science of hydraulics. The incoming tide sweeps the fish close to the shore; the outgoing tide funnels them into the charfia and ultimately to the traps, which are woven barrels tipped on their sides. The traps allow the smallest fish to escape. The system is not used year-round, allowing the fish to replenish.
The tides are stronger when the moon becomes full, giving the method a sense of cosmic spirituality. Kerkennah fishermen talk of “alive” and “dead” days for collecting fish, based on the moon cycles.
Omar checks his traps once every two days. On this occasion, he jumped into water less than a metre deep, untied a trap from the end of the charfia, lifted it high, opened the bottom and poured the fish into a plastic bucket on the deck of his boat. In quick succession, he emptied three other traps. Omar grimaced. The total haul consisted of a couple dozen small fish, most no bigger than the palm of a hand, and two blue crabs.
“Every year, we get less and less fish, and lots of dead fish,” Omar told us. “The bottom trawlers take too many and some fish are killed by leaking oil.”
He pointed to a structure barely visible on the horizon – an oil drilling platform.
Charfia fishing, and the artisanal way of life it has nurtured for centuries on this quiet, calm archipelago, is under grave threat. The sea around the Kerkennah islands is overexploited by illegal fishing trawlers, large boats that drag nets along the sea floor. They kill everything in their path, including the seagrass that forms a subsea meadow in the shallow waters around the islands.
Those meadows were once teeming with octopus and fish such as orata (also known as sea bream), skate and mullet. But no longer. Marine biologists and environmental charities say that the overfishing, combined with pollution, has pushed the Kerkennah fishery to the verge of collapse.
At the same time, climate change is warming the Mediterranean, attracting invasive species from the Red Sea, which is connected to the Med by Egypt’s Suez Canal. Blue crabs are fairly recent arrivals and they are ubiquitous and omnivorous. They compete with native fish for food, and their sharp claws can tear holes in fishing nets and charfia traps.
But the trawlers pose the greatest threat. “They destroy everything, including the fish reproduction areas,” said Hamed Mallat, 33, a marine biologist who works with local environmental charities and lives on Kerkennah. “They turn the seabed into a desert.”
He estimates that some 3,000 trawlers – generally wooden boats eight to 12 metres long, with powerful diesel engines – work the waters between Kerkennah and Sfax, the mainland city about an hour and a half away by car ferry. Officially, they are not allowed to drag their nets along the bottom in shallow water, but, Mr. Mallat points out, “There are no daily patrols to stop them.”
TUNISIA
El Kraten
Sfax
KERKENNAH ISLANDS
El Attaya
El Ramla
Ouled Kacem
Mellita
Tunis
TUNISIA
Gulf of Gabès
10 km
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap
TUNISIA
El Kraten
Sfax
KERKENNAH ISLANDS
El Attaya
El Ramla
Ouled Kacem
Mellita
Tunis
Gulf of Gabès
TUNISIA
10 km
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap
TUNISIA
El Kraten
Sfax
El Attaya
KERKENNAH ISLANDS
El Ramla
Ouled Kacem
Mellita
Tunis
Gulf of Gabès
TUNISIA
10 km
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap
Kerkennah lies about 20 kilometres offshore of Sfax. The arid islands, which cover 160 square kilometres, have been inhabited since the Phoenician and Roman eras; crumbling Roman lookout towers and other structures are visible here and there.
The islands have always thrived on fish and octopus made prolific by the seagrass, which is the most extensive in the Mediterranean. About 900 Kerkennians are directly employed in fishing (the women who ran our hotel operate a charfia). Calling it an “industry” is a misnomer, since traditional charfia fishing is sustainable, forgiving to the environment and uses natural materials such as twine and palm fronds – though plastic and steel traps are making a rude appearance.
The origins of charfia are not known, though the locals assume the method goes back centuries, to the Ottoman era. In any case, it has embedded itself into the culture. Those who are not fishing are cleaning and selling fish, cooking them in restaurants, making nets or charfia traps, or building and repairing fishing boats. The charfia come with effective riparian rights – ownership of the charfia itself and the water immediately around it is passed from one generation to the next. “My father inherited his charfia from his father, and his father from his father,” said Omar’s uncle, Abderrazak Joulak, a career fisherman who recently called it quits.
I asked why he gave up fishing. “Bye-bye fish,” he said, drawing on a Mars International cigarette.
Since the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, fishing has deteriorated steadily in the region. Abderrazak Joulak, who had been fishing since he dropped out of school at 15, instead found work as a manager in a cafe.
Abderrazak dropped out of school at the age of 15 to work his father’s charfia, and later on large offshore boats that sailed as far south as Libya. The fishery was productive enough to allow him and his family to live well. His one big blow came in 2005, when Tunisian migrants stole his boat and drove it to Lampedusa, the small Italian island between Tunisia and Sicily that is often the destination of North Africans eager to live in Europe. He could not afford to retrieve the boat.
Since the Tunisian Revolution in 2011 – the uprising that begat the Arab Spring – the fishing has deteriorated steadily, he said. The downturn is partly for sociological reasons. The revolution triggered an economic crisis from which Tunisia has yet to recover. High unemployment drove thousands of young men out of the cities and into coastal areas, where they took up fishing. The lack of fishery regulations, and the sporadic to non-existent enforcement of the regulations that did exist, ensured that the fish stocks dwindled.
Two years ago, Abderrazak found work as a manager in a café. “The fishing no longer covered the expenses of our daily lives,” he said. “The destruction by the bottom trawlers gets worse and worse.”
Charfia has embedded itself into local culture. Those who are not fishing are cleaning and selling fish, cooking them in restaurants, or making nets, like Rabiaa Achour, who weaves them by hand.
Hamed Mallat is a marine biologist who lives on Karkennah and works with local environmental charities. He says the trawlers pose the greatest threat. 'They turn the seabed into a desert.'
The fishing trawlers are in plain sight in the packed Kerkennah and Sfax harbours. The Tunisian government impounds a few of the boats once in a while, or fines their captains, but, for the most part, leaves them alone, since they form an industry that employs thousands of young men who might otherwise sit idle in cafés. Arresting the captains is also tricky, since the boats operate legally when they are in open, deep waters. The opposite is true when their nets scrape the seabed in the allegedly protected Kerkennah shallows.
Ali, a 28-year-old freelance fisherman who works in an oil processing plant outside of Sfax, told us that illegal trawling is booming because the large catches mean it pays well. “I can earn more in two days than the small fishermen can earn in a month,” said Ali, whom The Globe and Mail is not naming in full because he was arrested. “I bribed everyone and got released after three days.”
The nasty economics of fishing does not bode well for Kerkennah and its way of life. When the fish become harder to find, their price goes up. When their price goes up, fishermen will keep hunting them – until there are no more fish.
Some fisheries can bounce back quickly once fishing is reduced or eliminated for some time. Others recover only slowly, or never recover. Atlantic cod stocks off Newfoundland collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after decades of overfishing. More than 30 years later, the stocks have recovered only slightly, in spite of the fishing moratorium that was put in place in 1992.
In Kerkennah, the only bright spot, sort of, is the crab industry.
Blue crabs, virtually unknown around the islands until about a decade ago, are now abundant. Some local entrepreneurs have turned the invasive, destructive pests, which they call Daesh, after the Arab acronym for the Islamic State terrorists, into a business export opportunity.
Ste Mas Fish is one of the Kerkennah companies thriving off the crabs. It buys one to two tonnes of the crustaceans a day, sorts and cleans them, freezes them in huge refrigerators and packages them for export. South Korea, the United States and Italy are the main destinations. The plant opened in 2020 and employs about 25 women.
As the bottom trawlers’ work goes largely unchecked, the future does not look good for Kerkennah’s traditional fishing methods and its hundreds of charfia. Mr. Mallat, the marine biologist, and his environmental colleagues are working hard to restore the seagrass and raise public awareness about the destruction caused by the trawlers.
The goal is to see them banned in the waters around Kerkennah. He is gambling that the local fishermen will raise the alarm that the trawlers are destroying the fishery and the islands’ way of life. “The charfia fishermen are really angry now,” he said. “It’s important for everyone to know what a treasure is about to be lost.”
Charfia is distinct enough to be recognized by UNESCO as an 'Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,' yet it remains under threat as long as the bottom trawlers’ presence goes largely unchecked.