Integration of Turkish Fisheries Sector and Fishing to the European Union

Fishing sector would be considered as one of the most important parts of Turkey's EU membership process. For Turkey, the most challenging issue is, as in the case of agricultural sector as well as fishing, not having a macro Turkish Fisheries Policy. Structural problems of fisheries in Turkey, namely production mostly based on hunting, unconscious and destructive hunting, technical and technological incompetence and lack of entrepreneurship and incentives are the main problems reducing the competitiveness of fisheries policy in Turkey. The ambiguous governmental policies are defined as the primary reason the current situation at the sector of fisheries. Fisheries and aquaculture sectors still have no holistic, encouraging, supporting and managing state mechanism in Turkey. Therefore, when Progress Report of Turkey on compliance with the EU acquis is analyzed, the issues of the Fisheries Act, resource and fleet management, supervision and control, market intervention system in the area of market policies, state aid and international treaties and structural actions are mentioned as the issues that almost no progress has been achieved under the title of fisheries. Furthermore, even the necessary pre-conditions and fundamental reforms in the sector are not in compliance with the acquis. In this study, the phases of EU integration process in terms of fisheries in aquaculture sector are examined, deficiencies are determined and some solutions to these problems are tried to be proposed.