ELOUNDA, Crete – On a recent morning in Elounda Bay in eastern Crete, 53-year-old fishermen Mohammed Zak Zouk and Manolis Priniotakis were examining their catch in a wooden fishing boat. There was almost no sea bream, one of their most lucrative fish. Instead, they had netted around 60 kilograms of unsellable silver-cheeked toadfish, an invasive species with razor-sharp teeth and a habit of chewing through nets and devouring other fish. The species arrived from the Red Sea more than a decade ago and has multiplied in the eastern Aegean in recent years, wreaking havoc for fishermen.
Under new regulations announced by Greece’s Rural Development and Food Ministry on June 25, fishermen like Zak Zouk and Priniotakis would be eligible to receive state subsidies of €5.33 per kilo of toadfish to compensate for damage to their equipment and other losses. The move comes after years of lobbying by fishing associations, who regularly lose equipment and marketable fish to predators. As he disentangled sea cucumbers from a pile of yellow nets, Zak Zouk said he saw the proposed subsidies as a victory. “We won,” he recalled thinking when he heard the news on the radio the day before.
But even as fishermen are celebrating the prospect of help, many wonder whether the government will be able to implement it. Priniotakis and Zak Zouk said they had called the Coast Guard to ask how they could collect on what that day would have been almost €320 worth of toadfish, only to discover that the local officials they had reached told them they were not aware of the new policy, which has yet to be implemented.
