sight short high risk

Forest and Bird, Issue 282, 1 November 1996, Page 22

sight short

high risk

MARK FELDMAN

Barry Weeber

Barry Weeber

what's Wrong with our fisheries New Zealand's fisheries are still being exploited for short-term gain and not long-term sustainability.

looks at the disaster of the Canadian cod fishery and how we can avoid continuing down the same road.

IVE HUNDRED years ago John Cabot discovered the world’s richest fishery — the Grand Banks off the eastern coast of Canada. For the next four centuries, communities devoted to cod fishing sprung up all along the coast of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New England as the Grand Banks were fished from small boats using handlines and pots. Humanity made little impact on the cod populations over that time: the Banks provided regular and seemingly permanent food and income for hundreds of thousands of people. There were occasional bad years, and the North Atlantic was always treacherous, but the communities and the cod continued to prosper. Then technology upset the balance of life along the Banks. Diesel engines, nylon fishing nets, power haulers and sonar changed everything. Cod were no longer able to escape or spawn freely, and their populations began to drop. As the cod declined, technology continued to improve and fishers were able to catch more fish even though there were fewer in the water. Finally the fishers developed the ultimate weapon — the pair-trawler. These two diesel-powered 20-metre trawlers were able to drag a huge nylon net between them and vacuum up every living thing in their path. By 1992 the cod were gone, the world’s richest fishery was closed and remains so. It is doubtful the cod will return in our lifetime. As well as being an environmental disaster, 50,000 Canadians are out of work, millions of dollars invested in boats, processing plants and distribution systems have been lost, and the social fabric of hundreds of communities has been destroyed. In this age of environmental awareness, how could an advanced nation like

Canada manage a valuable resource so badly? Its cod fishery was controlled through a quota system like ours, it had plenty of fisheries scientists, and management systems in place that were as good, if not better, than our own. Despite all this, the Canadians destroyed their most valuable fishery. If we examine some of the blunders of the Grand Banks it will be easy to see how close we are to following the same path. HEN FISH ARE managed under a quota system like New Zealand’s, a Total Allowable Commercial Catch (TACC) is set by the government each year. The TACC is the total weight of fish that commercial boats are allowed to catch. But, in practice, no one measures how many fish are actually

caught unless Ministry of Fisheries observers are on board. What is measured is the number of fish that are brought into port. The difference between what’s caught and what’s landed at the dock is waste, and there’s lots of it. No one paid much attention to how the Canadian cod were caught. Methods that are extraordinarily wasteful, like pair-trawling and gill-netting, were poorly regulated. The result was that tonnes of undersized cod and other, unwanted, species were shovelled overboard after each tow of the net. When the catch was weighed in at port the dead, rejected fish were, of course, not counted in the quota. The same thing is happening in New Zealand. Trawlers can capture huge numbers of fish with each tow. The fish that are caught first are jammed against the

net and subjected to tremendous pressure as more fish build up within the net. These fish are damaged and have reduced market value. In addition, many young, undersized fish are trapped later in the tow because the bigger fish have clogged up the holes in the netting. Estimates of waste are around 20-30 percent — for every ten tonnes of snapper landed from a trawler another two to three tonnes of damaged and undersized fish are thrown overboard. Fishers can’t take the undersized fish into port and don’t want the damaged fish.

The Ministry of Fisheries has attempted to reduce the waste by regulating the mesh size and design of the trawl nets, and banning the trawlers from areas where juvenile snapper are known to live in large numbers. But the fishing industry has fiercely resisted. Another problem is a practice known as "high-grading" where high-quality, high-value fish are selected out. A snapper that weighs between 1.2 to 3.3 kilograms will fetch more money per kilo than a fish that’s bigger or smaller. When fishers have fixed quotas they want to get the maximum money for their limited catch, so they are tempted to only land the fish that are within the ideal size range and throw back the less desirable fish. eee

A study by the Ministry of Fisheries has shown that high-grading is common in the snapper fishery — particularly with longline fishers. Some of the rejected fish do survive because being hooked on a longline is less traumatic than being crushed in a trawl net, but the death rate is still high. Solutions to the high-grading problem are possible. One easy one in longline fisheries is a hook designed by Paul Barnes of Auckland. Paul’s hook would prevent guthooking (which usually kills the fish) and increase the survival rate dramatically. Earlier this year Doug Kidd indicated his support by funding research into the hook’s effectiveness. Another possible solution is to force longliners to use larger hooks so small fish cannot be caught. This would mean higher bait costs and a lower catch rate but it would save wasting hordes of small snapper. Since small snapper tend to live in shallow water, the catch of small fish could be reduced by closing all shallow areas of the inshore fishery to longliners. Of course, if rules on hook size or style were introduced, their use would also apply to all amateur fishers. The recreational sector takes about a third of the

snapper caught each year and also has a considerable waste problem, killing many thousands of small snapper each year because they’re gut-hooked by inexperienced fishers using small hooks. ET’S RETURN TO the story of the fisheries disaster and see how much the scientific errors they made are like the ones we are making right now. To understand how fisheries scientists got things so wrong we need to know a little about how they do their job. Fisheries science is not easy. You can’t just go out and count fish the way you can

count sheep. Even if you survey part of the ocean there’s no guarantee the area you survey will be typical. Fish tend to concentrate in pockets to spawn, feed or rest; the areas and times they choose to do these things can vary from year to year. Making things even more difficult is the fact that baby fish, the ones that will keep the fishery going in future years, usually live separate lives from the adults, eating other things in other places. The survival of the young (called recruitment) is a critical issue. Without knowing how the young fish are doing it’s impossible to decide how to manage the adult fish that are available now. In a healthy fishery many millions of eggs are laid; so many that the number of fry that survive has more to do with the right water temperature and food supply than the number of eggs laid. But in a damaged fishery — like our orange roughy or snapper — where there are very few adults, the number of eggs that are laid can be much more critical. The Canadians missed this point and didn’t keep track of recruitment. Instead they relied on complex mathematical formulas that predicted future stocks based on trawl surveys. The formulas that fisheries scientists use are based upon a series of assumptions (like constant recruitment and constant mortality) which are now known to be unreliable. The Canadians

relied on the formulas and lost a fishery. Unfortunately the same thing is happening here. We depend on these complex formulas to make our fisheries decisions because it’s much cheaper to do the maths than get out and survey the fish. To understand just how bad it is you need to know a little more fisheries science. The state of a fishery is measured by the biomass — the tonnes of a species in the water. The biomass is expressed as a percentage of the tonnes of fish that were in the water before humans started catching them in a big way and disturbed the natural balance. An undisturbed fishery has a biomass of 100 percent. A fishery that’s well managed and has good recruitment would have a biomass between 25 percent and 50 percent. The orange roughy fishery off the Chatham Rise has been reduced after less than two decades’ exploitation to a biomass of 13 percent; the snapper fisheries in the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty only have a biomass of 12 percent — just half of what they need to sustain themselves over the long term. These fisheries are perilously close to being unable to produce enough young to sustain themselves. A few years of bad weather, continued killing of young fish though wasteful fishing, disease and/or continued poaching could easily lead to a crash and the loss of these resources for many years.

A new fisheries law

FTER FIVE YEARS of debate, including 18 months in front of a select committee, the new 428page Fisheries Act came into force on 1 October. While the principles in the new legislation are an improvement over the old fisheries laws it replaces, they are still much weaker than the sustainability provisions in the Resource Management Act. The purpose of the legislation still focuses on "sustainable utilisation" rather than sustainable management of fisheries. This means that the interests of those such as divers and tourists, who in the narrow sense don’t "use" fisheries, are generally excluded from consideration. While the Resource Management Act can deal with many non-use issues up to 12 nautical miles from shore, the focus in the rest of the EEZ will be on extraction and use. When making decisions under the new Act, the Minister of Fisheries must consider: mum the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations’;

mum avoiding, remedying, or mitigating any adverse effect of fishing on the aquatic environment"; mu Maintenance of associated and dependent species; mu Maintenance of biological diversity; and mum protection of habitat of particular significance for fisheries management. The new legislation also requires the minister to set catch limits at a level which will ensure that fish populations or stocks are maintained at or above the level that would support the maximum sustainable yield (MSY). Depleted stocks — for example northern snapper, Chatham Rise orange roughy or oreos — are required to be restored to the MSY stock level. There is no maximum time period, however, as is required in Antarctic fisheries, within which a stock can be rebuilt. Instead, the rebuilding period is within that "appropriate to the stock and any environmental conditions affecting the stock". In the case of

snapper the minister has indicated this is 10 to 15 years. A major weakness in the new legislation is its public participation procedures. The Act only allows groups selected by the minister to be involved in fisheries management processes. Already the minister has excluded the Marine Sciences Society — the specialist group of experts on marine sciences — from forums where the questions of funding and priorities for marine science research are discussed. Important changes have also been made to the Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Wildlife Act. The Minister of Conservation, with the agreement of the Minister of Fisheries, is now able to set limits on the number of protected species such as marine mammals and seabirds that can be killed as bycatch during fishing operations. Disappointingly, however, the new Act contains no requirements to move bycatch towards zero.

Another critical mistake made in Canada was to depend on commercial trawl catches as the basis for research. After using a trawler to gather fish in a net, scientists then count, measure and age the fish. Then they use their formulas to predict the state of the fishery. The trawl surveys by the Canadian scientists revealed very few fish. The fishers argued that the scientists didn’t know where to look and should be using the commercial trawl results instead. This was the road to doom. Commercial fishers are good at one thing — catching fish. As fisheries decline, the fishers always know where the last strongholds will be. Canadian scientists made the error of assuming that the trawl surveys in areas where the fish were concentrated represented the whole

ocean. It was a fateful move and one that has also been made here. For years, commercial fishing lobbyists in New Zealand have been telling us that aerial surveys of kahawai showed that there were heaps in the water. The government scientists at first went along with this line. But, in response to arguments from recreational fishers, scientists began to realise that the aerial surveys only revealed kahawai in a few small areas, probably those where the fish found the best food supply. Even if there were only a few kahawai left, they would still be found in these particular areas. A similar downhill road is being followed in other fisheries where the total commercial catch or "Catch per Unit Effort" (CPUE) — how many fish the fishers catch per hours of trawling, number of fish hooks, lengths of gill-net etc — is used to determine the health of the fishery. The assumption behind CPUE is simple: if the CPUE is going up the fishery must be healthy, if it’s going down something must be wrong. But there are two serious problems with CPUE. One is that it depends on the industry’s own figures. These tend to be unreliable due to bias and sloppy record keeping. But there’s a more ominous problem: every year as commercial fishers get better tools, they get better at finding fish. Colour video sounders, massive nylon nets, powerful diesel engines and GPS plotters have made it easier for them to locate and catch their prey. This increases their CPUE even though there are fewer fish in the water. There are some simple ways to avoid a Grand Banks-style disaster. One is to keep the biomass of fish in the water well above what the formulas suggest, always

remembering that only a fool doesn't insure his business. The other is not to rely on statistics from those who have a direct interest in exploiting the resource. The government — the public guardian of the resource — needs to gather its own. This requires money for research (see box page 26) — money the industry would prefer not to part with. This brings us to the last, and most important, cause of the collapse of the Canadian fisheries — the political influence of commercial fishing companies and its effect on scientific research. O UNDERSTAND the politics of fisheries management you need to know how a fishery develops. When a new fishery is discovered — like our orange roughy — commercial boats converge on it quickly; they know the easy money is made before the fish are overexploited. By the time scientists begin to study the fishery they are already years behind the fishers. It takes several seasons to get information on the true state of a fishery; by then the fish are already hurting. It takes more time before officials and politicians act. All the time there is resistance from fishing companies as their lobbyists hammer at the scientists and politicians, pushing for higher quotas. By the time limits are being set on the fishery, the public process is years behind (and seldom catches up). This is the evolution of the "too-little, too-late" style of fisheries management that pushes the fish populations down a descending staircase of sustainability. This classic pattern was followed with the Canadian cod fishery. Although the fishery wasn’t new, the explosive growth and power of the trawlers created the same

descending staircase as happened in New Zealand waters when trawlers attacked the orange roughy on the Chatham Rise or the snapper in the Bay of Plenty. In order to try and combat the financial power of the fishing industry, the Ministry of Fisheries has established a well-ordered consultation process. This process brings together the groups interested in the fishery (commercial fishers, recreational and tourist sectors, conservation groups, Maori interests) with ministry officials. The idea is to exchange ideas on how the various species should be managed that year and hopefully come to a consensus. When the process is complete the minister finally makes a decision on the next year’s quotas.

The fishing companies can afford to hire their own lobbyists and scientists. Because of all the difficulties in assessing the populations of fish in the sea these "hired guns" are able to argue endlessly with government scientists about their research results, putting tremendous pressure on them. The government scientists are no different from anybody else; they don’t like being harassed and hassled about every conclusion they come to. More often than not, the net result of the process is an unbalanced "scientific" conclusion that makes the fishery look better off than it really is. The consultative process is also corrupted by the financial power of the industry. Their representatives pack the

meetings; it’s not unusual for there to be a 5:1, or even 10:1, ratio of commercial representatives to those from the other sectors. The industry lobbyists are paid well and are making money while they prepare and sit through those meetings. Everyone else is losing money through having to take time off work. Airfares, motel bills and meals add to the burden. The fishing industry has had no hesitation about using the courts to achieve its goals. When studies by the Ministry of Fisheries revealed the degree of fish waste from trawlers, the industry tried to block the release of the data by going to court. The industry tried to similarly delay publication of the (unpalatable) results of a ministry study on the frequency of high-grading. When other studies revealed how many baby snapper the trawlers and longlines killed, the industry again used litigation to try to block the release of the information. Right now the industry is using its lawyers to prevent the Minister of Fisheries from reducing the snapper quota off the East Coast of the North Island. Over a year ago the minister reduced the commercial snapper quota by 40 percent

We eat them but how much do we know about them?

OST RECOVERY is a major feature of the new fisheries regime. In other words the expense of managing fisheries should be borne as much as possible by those who are making money from them. An essential part of this management is research into the state of fish populations. It is impossible to make sound decisions about the size of the allowable catch without understanding something about population size, life histories and recruitment rates of each species. Most of this research is funded by the government through levies on the industry. Yet while export receipts from fishing have increased by 30 percent since 1991 to $1,237 million, funding for fisheries research has decreased by 37 percent to $14.45 million in the same period. The effects of the cuts means that many scientists who have left the old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries or

NIWA the Crown Research Institute that has taken over the research — have not been replaced, and NIWA has had to lay off a third of the crew from its research vessels. Despite this massive decline in research funding, the fishing industry has argued over the past two years for further substantial cuts. The effect of more cuts would be to undermine genuinely independent fisheries research and ensure that only the work that the industry finds directly useful would get done. Studies focusing on the environmental impacts of fishing or research into critical stocks such as orange roughy, oreos or snapper would be downgraded. There are still huge gaps in our understanding of New Zealand’s fish populations. Of the 151 stocks at present in the quota management system, there are current biomass estimates for only 12. Of the 91 stocks for which there are

sustainable yield estimates, less than 30 are based on scientific analysis with the remainder dependent only on catchaveraging formulas. There is also insufficient information on many of the key biological parameters needed to assess fish stocks. For example, fish size and rates of growth are known for only half the 51 species covered by the quota system and the age of fish is known for only 19. Yet catch limits are still set for these species. The fishing industry needs to remember that there are other interests in the marine environment other than those associated with commercial exploitation. The new Fisheries Act brings the environmental effects of fishing onto centre stage and the introduction of more species into the quota system will inevitably require further research.

in an attempt to save the fishery. The industry sued, the legal process was dragged out and the older (higher) quota remained. This September Doug Kidd set the same lower quota for the 1996-97 season as he’d unsuccessfully attemped to set a year before. Again the industry rushed to court and obtained an interim order setting aside the decision. The industry’s case arguing against the merits of the new quota will now not be heard until next March. In the meantime the snapper continue to be overfished. F WE WANT TO retain the wealth of our fisheries then changes must be made in how we manage them: a quota system in itself is not enough. Waste must be eliminated through the use of what’s called "input controls". Changing the size and style of fish hooks, altering present trawling methods, protecting areas where baby fish live, and eliminating wasteful gill-nets are all input controls. The scientific process must be modified to improve safety margins. Managing a fishery at or below a biomass of 25 percent is risky. We need more insurance against the danger of error when we have too little research and hard data, and too much dependence on abstract formulas. The consultative process could be repaired by requiring the industry to contribute to the bills of other sectors. After all, the industry wants to profit from a public resource and it should also have to pay to protect the resource. But most of all, the core of the prob-

lem lies with the boards of our big fishing companies. As long as these "captains of industry" use their financial power to push for maximal catches now, instead of sustainability, the management process will fail. The quota system was introduced with the hope that commercial fishers would care for the resource they had a vested interest in; it didn’t work. The industry is still looking backwards, trying to relive the days of big catches and outlandish profits. What we need now is people that look ahead, people who can think and act for the long-term health of the only fishery we will ever have. Brian Rhodes, the former Chief Executive at Sealords, said it best when he left the business in 1994: "Far too large a proportion of New Zealand’s economic community still expends its efforts on finding ways to take value, rather than create value in an organisation. In periods of high inflation and high interest rates, a short-term view of business is understandable, but it’s time our financial community accepts that we are now operating in a new business environment which will provide an immense reward for those who are in for the long haul." muss.

Mark FELDMAN 1s a doctor and amateur fisherman who writes regularly on fishing and fisheries conservation.