The Mediterranean coast, including Adana, contributes significantly to the national fish production, particularly for grouper, sole, sea bream, tuna, and shrimp species. Local fisheries encompass both small-scale and large-scale operations and affect the livelihoods of many residents. The sector also supports direct employment in fisheries and secondary industries such as fish processing, transport and equipment supply. There are two fishing ports in Adana, of which the largest and most active is Karataş, 45 km from Adana.
The port city of Karataş sits right on the eastern part of the Mediterranean coast. This is a town where the majority of its people are engaged in fishing, going back some 3000 years, harvesting a large number and variety of commercially important species. The Karataş fishing co-operative consists of 300 vessels, of which 90 are large-scale (bottom trawlers and purse seiners) and the rest are small-scale (gillnets and gillnets).
The co-operative has 260 fisher members, and 80% of the residents of Karataş district rely on fishing as their primary source of income. This is also from where 13 fishers (representing vessels ranging from small scale fisheries to purse seiners), one coast guard official, one port authority staff, and two ministry employers came to participate in a workshop for co-construction of knowledge during the first week of June 2024 with scientists from Çukurova University, supported by researchers from SINTEF Ocean in Norway.
This was the first stakeholder workshop in Türkiye for both the OptiFish and EVERYFISH Horizon Europe projects. The workshops were held at the same time, to minimise stakeholder fatigue, as these two projects have many of the same objectives around the digitalisation and automatisation of monitoring and reporting of European fisheries. The aim of the workshop was to co-construct future scenarios for how to ensure effective implementation of integration of camera technology for automatic catch registration on fishing vessels – and what the implications would be for the fishers in this region.
The workshop took place in Adana, Türkiye, on June 5th at the Sheraton hotel with an audience of 16 participants. The participants covered all parts of the stakeholder mapping process, had already been identified as the most relevant, interested, and powerful actors within the fishing sector in the region. The workshop started with Professor Gokhan Gokce from Çukurova University introducing both the OptiFish and EVERYFISH projects and explaining the methodology and GDPR elements of the projects, getting recorded agreements from all participants for both participation, video and picture releases prior to starting the workshop. The workshop was facilitated by Timuçin Dinçer and Yunus Emre Fakıoğlu, who had attended a training session (train-the-trainer workshop) with SINTEF Ocean colleagues beforehand to ensure that the workshops used the same methodology as that of the Norwegian one, allowing results to be comparable in a scientific context. The discussion was lively, and the fishers were very engaged with the topic expressing some of their hesitations
We thank all participants who have attended workshops so far and look forward to analysing results from this and future workshops seeking to integrate stakeholder views and worries into OptiFish efforts towards better fisheries management for all.
Text by Rachel Tiller, SINTEF Ocean.
Disclaimer
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
