Tuna pens off Sikka l-Bajda to stay in same location

The government has given up on finding an alternative location further away from the Mellieha and St Paul’s Bay coast for two tuna pen establishments.

Instead, it has presented a planning application to turn the present temporary location of the farms into a permanent one.

The present temporary site which hosts tuna pens owned by AJD Tuna Ltd and Malta Mariculture Ltd  is located 4.5km from the protected  Rdum tal-Madonna cliffs off Mellieha. The cliffs host storm petrel bird colonies.

The current site is also located some 4.8km from Qawra Point in St Paul’s Bay. The area is designated as a marine protected area.

A previous application submitted in 2019 had proposed locating the permanent aquaculture zone for northern tuna pens some 5.7km from the Mellieħa cliffs and 7.6 km from Qawra Point within the marine protected area.

The major drawback of the application was that the proposed site was just 4.6km away from Ħondoq ir-Rummien in Qala.

Although a case officer had recommending approval, the application was dropped following objections from the Qala local council.

The council had submitted a technical report warning that the new farm could lead to oil slicks as large as 10 cubic metres being released each day. If winds blow from the east, they could reach the Gozitan coast in 17 hours.

No increase in tuna biomass

While the 2019 application to relocate the farms closer to Gozo envisaged an increase in the total biomass of fish kept in the pens from 3,300 tonnes to 5,000 tonnes, the present application emphatically states that there will be no increase in the  total biomass of fish. The current application also states that there will be no change in conditions imposed in a permit issued to Charles Azzopardi’s AJD Tuna Ltd in 2019.

The permit which had also increased the number of cages from 12 to 24 was issued as a “an interim solution until an appropriate location to accommodate the North Aquaculture Zone is approved and established”.

Following the presentation of an Environmental Impact Assessment,  ERA had concluded that the proposed development is unlikely to have significant residual impacts, due to the temporary nature of the tuna pens until the North Aquaculture Zone is set up. Moreover, ERA also noted that  the operations are restricted to “small portion” of the total area of the Special Area of Conservation.

Negative impacts foreseen in the EIA included an oil pollution resulting from the increase in maritime traffic in the area and the risk posed to storm petrels by an increase of predatory yellow legged gulls attracted by the increase in small fish.  To avert these risks ERA had included several stringent conditions.

ERA has now requested a statement from the coordinator of the EIA for the temporary site approved in 2019 to state whether turning the temporary site in to a permanent will change the conclusions made in the study and whether an update of these studies is required.