Libyan fishers lament foreign trawling

When Faraj Abdelsadiq returns to port in Al Khoms after long hours fishing at sea, he often has little to show for the time and fuel spent on the journey.

A catch that once covered his costs and provided him with a decent income has become increasingly meagre. Making a living from the Mediterranean off Libya’s coast grows harder year after year.

“I have been at sea for more than 20 years, but I have never seen the situation this bad,” says the 46-year-old traditional fisherman. “Fish stocks have declined, while trawlers operate in deeper waters and leave very little for us.”

Faraj used to make 1,000 to 2,000 Libyan dinars per fishing trip (USD 156 to 312). Now he sometimes cannot make even 300 dinars.

Thousands of Libyan fishers work aboard small, modestly equipped boats. Most cannot regularly reach deep waters. Yet they say they are feeling the effects of industrial bottom-trawling taking place far offshore – a practice they blame for depleting fish stocks and damaging seabed habitats that help sustain fisheries closer to the coast.

Libya has a fishing fleet of over 3,500 vessels, most of them small boats under 12 metres in length (Image: Egmont Strigl / imageBROKER.com / Alamy)

Declining catches

Libya has a coastline stretching nearly 2,000 km and a fishing fleet of more than 3,500 vessels. Like many other countries in the Southern Mediterranean, more than 90% of the fleet consists of small boats between 5 and 12 metres in length.

The fishers who own these boats generally make daily trips within 12 nautical miles of the coast, using traditional nets, fishing lines and traps to catch red mullet, sea bream and grouper, mostly in waters shallower than 50 metres.

Depths below 800 metres are not part of the usual fishing grounds for most Libyan fishers or indeed many trawlers operating in the Mediterranean.

Operating at such depths requires larger vessels with powerful engines, long warps, heavy-duty winches and equipment capable of handling the loads involved in deploying and hauling trawl gear hundreds of metres below the surface. Such capacity is far beyond that of small-scale fishers like Faraj Abdelsadiq.

But the inability of local fleets to reach these deep waters does not protect them from overfishing.

Fishers like this man checking his nets in the port of Khoms have struggled to catch enough fish in recent years, Dialogue Earth has been told (Image: BasPhoto / Alamy)

Between southern Sicily and northern Libya, seabeds at depths of roughly 400-800 metres include important fishing grounds for giant red shrimp.

These highly prized shrimp are found along the continental slope off Libya, with fishing grounds extending into waters hundreds of metres deep. Their high commercial value has long attracted distant-water trawlers from the Italian port of Mazara del Vallo.

In 2011, amid political turmoil and what researchers described as an absence of control by Libyan authorities, around 40 distant-water trawlers operated in fishing grounds off Libya, some catching as much as 300-350 kg of red shrimp a day before takes rapidly declined.

A seabed under threat

The effects of bottom trawling are not limited to the animals brought to the surface.

As nets are dragged across the seabed, they break cold-water corals, smash sponges, kill organisms that form habitats for marine life and stir up sediments that have remained undisturbed for many years.

Animals living in these environments often grow and reproduce slowly, and recovery may take decades. Some areas may never fully regain their ecological balance.

This has knock-on effects for small-scale fishers. Some trawlers directly catch species such as red mullet, which is also an important part of Libya’s artisanal catch. Others hunting shrimp in the depths can damage ecosystems that provide feeding, spawning and nursery grounds for animals that are later caught in shallower waters by local fishers.

“The country’s marine wealth belongs to all Libyans and must not be left at the mercy of foreign vessels and unregulated fishing practices that deplete the sea’s resources and undermine fishers’ livelihoods,” says Ismail Al-Shaqman, head of the Libyan Association of Friends of Artisanal Fishing.

He wants the Ministry of Marine Resources, marine inspection authorities and the coast guard to strengthen the monitoring of Libya’s waters and enforce existing rules on unlicensed fishing, prohibited gear and destructive fishing practices. He argues that better enforcement is needed to protect deep-sea ecosystems and also to reduce pressure on resources relied on by Libya’s small-scale fishing communities before the damage becomes too severe for either the sea or fishing communities to recover from.

Raising the depth limit

In 2005, Mediterranean countries agreed to prohibit bottom trawls and towed dredges at depths greater than 1,000 metres in the entire Mediterranean Sea.

The precautionary measure was intended to prevent fishing from expanding into little-studied deep-sea ecosystems. Also in 2005, following decades of overfishing by Italian-flagged deep-water trawlers, Libya declared a fisheries protection zone extending up to 74 nautical miles from its coastline.

Conservation groups want the ban on bottom trawling in the Mediterranean expanded to cover all depths below 800 metres. In a report published earlier this year, the environmental organisations Oceana and MedReAct say protecting this additional band of water would make little difference economically and bring “potential benefits for vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems”.

Although this would not shut the main red shrimp fishing depths to commercial boats, it would protect a key band of cold-water corals, sponge grounds, sea-pen fields and other habitats that support wider ecosystems, say campaigners.

Nicolas Fournier, campaign director for marine protection at Oceana Europe, told Dialogue Earth that Libya’s limited ability to monitor its waters leaves them vulnerable to foreign fleets, which require permission to fish legally in its waters. “We know that some Italian vessels fish there to target deep-water species, and perhaps vessels from other countries do as well, but the data are weak,” he said.

There is evidence to support this claim. A study published in 2024 looked at those 40 trawlers from the Italian port of Mazara del Vallo fishing in Libya’s fisheries protection zone in 2011. In seven months, this unrestricted access depleted shrimp stocks that had taken years to build up, the study found.

Evidence including vessel-tracking data and fisheries registries examined by the Med Mosaic grant and Dialogue Earth between 2023 and 2025 also shows activity by 12 EU-Italy flagged vessels in Libyan waters. These vessels are registered at the Mazara port in Sicily and our review found no publicly available evidence that they had received the required Libyan authorisation to fish, strongly suggesting their activity could be considered illegal under Libyan law.

Known unknowns in the deep

At the moment there is still much that is unknown about Libya’s deep-sea ecosystem.

“We cannot protect what we do not measure,” says Abdelmajid Militan, an environmental scientist at Misrata University. “We need maps of affected areas, regular monitoring of fish stocks, and systems that can trace catches back to where and by which vessel they were taken.”

Without adequate data, such habitats could be degraded before Libyan institutions fully understand their ecological role, potentially weakening fish stocks that support fishing communities elsewhere along the coast.

Small-scale fishers target species including red mullet (Image © Greenpeace / Alessandro Giannì)

But they fear that industrial fishing for giant red shrimp endangers the ecosystem on which such species rely (Image: Islam Alatrash)

According to a 2025 assessment of Libya’s fisheries sector, prepared as part of an African Union project, the country’s vessel-monitoring system remains limited in its implementation, while ports and fish-landing sites lack systematic inspections.

Coordination among relevant authorities – including the Ministry of Marine Resources, Coast Guard, Navy, Customs and port authorities – is also fragmented, with monitoring often reactive rather than based on continuous preventive surveillance, according to the report.

Saber Al-Azabi, deputy minister of marine resources, told Dialogue Earth that data from the government ministry responsible for the ocean indicate that violations continue, including illegal entry of foreign vessels into Libyan waters.

Some vessels exploited periods of weak oversight, he says, and although such activity has declined in recent years it continues to pose a threat.

Al-Azabi said Libya supports stricter environmental and international regulations governing marine fishing, as these would help protect sensitive ecosystems and curb the depletion of marine resources in the depths of the Mediterranean.

“Libya has no objection to extending the ban to waters deeper than 800 metres. This proposal is consistent with our policy of reducing the depletion of marine resources in the deep Mediterranean,” he says.

In neighbouring Egypt, the issue has moved from scientific assessment to implementation, with the national fisheries authority beginning to prohibit bottom trawling in its Mediterranean waters beyond 800 metres deep.

The decision followed a pilot study conducted by the national authorities which, according to Oceana,  found that fishing any deeper made up less than 2% of the value of landed fish in places including Egypt,

Tunisia too is looking into the issue. The country participated in pilot studies which indicated that lowering the depth threshold could have a limited economic cost, but it has not yet announced a comparable national decision.

Experts say moving the bottom-trawling threshold will have little effect unless it is accompanied by monitoring and enforcement.

At the end of each day, small-scale fishers still return to port with whatever they have managed to catch in nearby waters. Abdelsadiq wants that sea to be respected before it is too late, even if that is out of his sight and beyond the reach of his fishing gear.

“We may not fish in those deep waters, but they are still part of the sea we depend on,” he says.

For now, what is happening in the deep waters off Libya, far from the ports and artisanal fleets and coastal trawlers, remains largely unseen.

This story was supported by a Med Mosaic Ocean Literacy Grant.