Cook with a Carefre e Conscience

Forest and Bird, Issue 313, 1 August 2004, Page 40

Cook with a Carefre

e Conscience

ANN GRAEME

—ANN GRAEME

show how consumers can help save our

oceans by using Forest and Bird’s ‘Good Fish Guide’.

pop hroughout the history of mankind, | the sea has been a food basket for J- everyone to harvest. With frail craft and little nets, fishermen caught food for the family or the village. The sea was vast and its resources seemed inexhaustible — but they werent. As human populations grew, more and more boats with bigger and bigger nets and increasingly sophisticated gear have ventured further and fished deeper, catching more and more fish. Now even the fabled North Sea cod, one of the world’s greatest fisheries, has been fished to commercial extinction. So the concept of the Exclusive Economic Zones was born as nations sought to safeguard their coastal fisheries; and few countries are as fortunate as little New Zealand with its huge zone, out to 200 nautical miles from shore around every speck of an island. Within our fishing zone we have the right and the opportunity to set up rules so that our fish will always be there for us to harvest.

The New Zealand Fisheries Act is designed to allocate catches within sustainable levels, and the Quota Management System is its tool to allocate catching rights for a set-catch limit. It is a good idea, but it is hard pressed. On one side is the fisheries research, patchy at its best, and non-existent at its worst, and on which the set-catch limits are based. On the other side are big profits and fishers with investments and jobs on the line. Also, the Quota Management System doesn’t look beyond the fish to the habitat damage that goes hand-in-hand with an easy harvest. So, within the quotas, some fishers continue to damage the sea bottom, destroy unwanted species and catch too many fish to sustain their populations. But it need not be all bad news. If money drives the problem of excessive fishing and bad fishing practices, it can also drive the solution. For money talks. The absolute dictator of the market is the money the consumer spends — and the consumer is you and me. We hold enormous power and we can marshal our power to change the ways of the fishers. Now that we have the "Good Fish Guide’ (included in this magazine), we can be choosy. We can reject the fish that we know

are being decimated by overfishing and whose capture drowns birds and destroys the sea bed and sea life. We can choose the fish that we know will always be available because the catch is more sustainable and the habitat is more secure. And we can influence other consumers, the vast and varied crowd of housewives, superannuatants, city workers, students and children whose shopping is the life blood of the fishing industry. Consumer power has worked before. Remember Genetically Engineered food? Such was the power of customer resistance that GE food stuffs couldn’t get a toehold in the New Zealand supermarket. After a campaign against GE-fed chicken, McDonald’s have announced that they will no longer use them. Their chickenburgers will not be tainted with even a suspicion of GE. The GE victory was easy because it depended entirely on the consumer’s selfinterest. People think GE products might be bad for them, so rejecting them was easy. The health campaigns about the risks of excess salt and sugar in our diets weren’t so easy because the health messages conflicted with our love of sweet and salty food, but still the buyers’ response led to a range of salt and sugar-reduced products being marketed. Let’s not insult ourselves — for we are the consumers — by suggesting that we only think about our stomachs. We can act selflessly for a cause we think is right.

Twenty years ago, the campaign to stop drift-net fishing showed just that. While governments tried to enact laws to stop the indiscriminate massacre by the enormous drift nets, we consumers demanded that our tuna wasn’t caught over the corpses of the dolphins entangled and drowned in the giant nets. In no time, ‘dolphin-friendly tuna, not caught in drift nets, swept the shelves and tuna tins proclaim it even today, when drift netting is hopefully only a memory. We cared about dolphins and we care that the albatrosses should fly above the southern oceans and not be dragged to a dreadful death on the hooks of long-line fishers. We want the undersea gardens of coral and seaweed to flourish, and not to be smashed beneath the rollers of the trawl nets. We don’t want sea creatures like crabs, sea urchins, the bizarre sea lilies and the sea pens to die, trashed as "by-catch’ from the nets dragged for scampi. We want sustainable fishing practices that work. We want to eat fish, and we want to eat it with an easy conscience. Why not tell family and friends overseas

te avoid eating hoki and orange roughy? Take your "Good Fish Guide’ with you when you go shopping. Tell the people around you about your choice of fish. Tell the person behind the counter too, and your friends and neighbours and family. We can make a difference.

co-ordinates the Kiwi

Conservation Club for Forest and Bird branches.