The fisherman future and option of the stakeholder

In the next programming period, to maximize the effectiveness of European Structural and Investment funds, (the ESI funds, including the financial instruments for cohesion policy, rural development and fisheries), the Commission has proposed the common provisions regulation (COM (2011) 615). This regulation sets out a common set of basic rules for all ESI funds. This includes provisions concerning conditionality, performance review, arrangements for monitoring, reporting, evaluation and eligibility rules. The EMFF provisions for the management and control systems and for financial management are aligned with those of the cohesion policy financial tools (the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund). It is believed that the institutional intervention, national and Community, is crucial to the economic and social competitiveness of the fisheries sector and aquaculture; while representing the legislative intervention characterizing a constraint for the same competitiveness (for known reasons in support of environmental sustainability of fish production), there is no doubt that without government intervention the fishing industry as a whole would be exposed to the dynamics of filthiness international markets, and the low profitability / efficiency / organization that makes less and less profitable activity of industry insiders. Without this conviction, to make speculations on the possible future of the fishing industry as a whole, and its employees, it was considered useful to resort to the views of some stakeholders of the fisheries and aquaculture sector in some Italian regions (Campania, Puglia, Lazio, Emilia Romagna and Veneto). The goal was to understand how “the sector” perceive and feel improved public intervention (based on the past programming period, 2007-2013), and what the needs not captured by the current programming. Before considering the merits of the answers, it seems useful to also fix some points on the current competitive situation of fisheries and aquaculture in Italy, by resorting to socio-economic indicators. The indicators are particularly useful to provide an accurate picture of the fisheries sector from a biological point of view, economic and social. In addition, an evaluation of the state of a system over time can be obtained by comparing the indicators with appropriate reference points. As reported by Caddy and Mahon (1995), these reference values should be associated with a critical condition or with an optimal condition; in the first case is identified a limit that you need to avoid, limit reference points (LRP), while in the second a target to be reached for the system, target reference points (TRP). Despite this, LRP and TRP are not easily identifiable for many indicators and / or, in many cases, the necessary data for their estimation are not available. An attempt to define a general list of indicators and reference points has been pursued by the FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries (FAO, 1999).