After Romania tightened anti-poaching laws in the Danube Delta, hundreds of fishermen crossed borders in search of work, settling along Italy’s Po River. What began as an effort to escape corruption and economic collapse has since evolved into a legal and environmental paradox.
Many Romanian fishermen left behind a system marked by degraded canals, monopolised fish markets and permits that were effectively unattainable. In Italy, they found themselves targeting invasive fish species — blamed for damaging the Po Delta’s fragile ecosystem and officially slated for removal by authorities. Yet the same activity has pushed many of them into illegality.
Italy’s fragmented regulatory framework, split between the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Veneto, combined with inconsistent enforcement and pressure from sport-fishing lobbies, has left migrant fishermen operating in a legal grey zone. For some, fishing remains a matter of subsistence. For others, it has become a lucrative underground trade involving night operations, electroshock devices and transnational networks that move fish across Europe while exploiting vulnerable labour.
The result is a closed and bitter circuit: fish once legally harvested in the Danube Delta are now poached in Italy and resold in Romania. Meanwhile, Italian authorities struggle to distinguish organised exploitation from survival-driven illegality — an ambiguity rooted in policy failures on both sides of the continent.