﻿Aotearoa’s Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, Tīkapa Moana and Te Moananui-ā-Toi. Stretching
from Te Arai to Waihi. Beautiful, biodiverse, unique in our world.
A treasure for tangata whenua, it’s always provided what we love,
and what we need. From above it looks spectacular, but beneath the surface it’s a different story.
It’s actually on the brink of ecological collapse. How did this happen and what can we do?
In this series we’ll take a deep dive into the Hauraki Gulf
to understand what is making our sea sick.
Prepare for some soul searching. In this episode we're going to look at commercial fishing.
The good, the bad and the potential for industrial evolution.
The traditions of fishermen is one of the older professions of the world.
It should be honored for the skills and the ability to feed people.
Our planet is exploding with populations that need to be fed.
There is a need for commercial fishing to feed people that can't go and catch fish themselves
because seafood is part of a healthy diet. We've got big problems with obesity and diabetes,
and a low fat, high volume protein is critical.
It's the commercial guys that put supermarket fish and restaurant fish in there for most Kiwis that
don't go rec fishing - it does provide seafood for people at reasonable prices.
The commercial fishing industry is a four billion dollar industry. And they put immense
pressure on the government. As soon as there is a conflict,
generally the industry will win. The enormous muscle that the commercial fishing
industry has had, right throughout New Zealand, it's incredible.
The volume of animals that are coming out, the extraction is
much too great. Commercial fishing in the marine park needs to be much, much better managed.
There have been some problems in the New Zealand industry with what
they call high grading and discards. Some of the discards have been legal.
Some of them have been illegal, but they're very hard to pick up. So we're requiring
all commercial fishers to land all of the fish that they catch.
Everything we extract is counted, whether we return it to the sea or whether we retain
it. So we don't turn fish over and don't count them, we actually count them.
We have very little monitoring. It's all kind of happening out of sight, out of mind.
We're going to police this through cameras on boats.
There's a place for cameras. I have always been supportive of them. I guess you've got
to balance out what they cost, who's going to be paying and how they're going to be reviewed.
I've had cameras on my boats, all my boats now, for over two years.
Nets coming up are bringing a lot of food to the surface so the birds
invariably congregate around the back of these boats seeking a free feed. And this is where
the birds are getting injured and killed. It's been estimated last year around 13,000
seabirds were caught in New Zealand by the commercial fishing sector,
which is a huge number. You know, on a global scale, it's just unacceptable.
On the water we try and do everything we can possible to,
to not catch these, taonga [Taonga - Treasure], seabirds.
When the government really has a system that puts those limits on, so say, limits in
bycatch or whether it's seabirds or marine mammals or something,
the fishing industry has proved remarkably capable of finding ways to reduce those things.
Bottom trawling. It’s an economically efficient way to harvest fish to provide kai for the people.
But what’s the cost, to the sea floor especially?
So things like bottom trawling, where you're dredging huge chains and trawl doors and
wheels across the sea floor, you're scooping up everything that's there. It’s still allowed in
about two thirds of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, our national park of the sea.
The incidental mortality outrates almost everything else, because as they get big
hauls the fish is smushed up into the back of the cod end and it actually gets pushed
through the netting. Through net mortality. The size of the dredges, the areas involved in
that sort of thing, we all understand that that benthic environment is being severely
damaged by it, and it needs to stop. Bottom trawling is just one of the most archaic
fishing practices that we have. We shouldn't be trying to maximise yield, we should be trying to
restore some of the damage that we've already done.
About 80 to 85 percent of the fish we catch as a business, in deep water and inshore, is
caught by trawl method. Most of that is on what you call mud, sand, shell
and, you know, just substrate that is almost but not quite recovered by the next tide or
the next storm. It's not coral forest that we go mowing over. That's not what we do.
You want to protect the places that are sensitive and some places don’t need much,
much protection. You know, I think trawling
is one of those things that's hugely misunderstood and mis-characterised.
Mid water trawling, in terms of benthic impacts, is quite different from bottom trawling.
If you're not fishing on the bottom and you're fishing off off the seafloor,
then there's certain species you just won't catch.
Trawling can actually be a pretty sophisticated fishing method. It can be very targeted.
The technology that's available today, to fish with extreme accuracy. And as long as the intent
to be saccurate and to be respectful is there, then there is a place for commercial trawling.
The Hauraki Gulf is a massive area. We've spent a lot of time and effort
developing the Precision Seafood Harvesting, which allows for the fish to come on board
literally alive in a suspended water volume. The evolution of industrial fishing methods,
like Precision Seafood Harvesting…. and mid-water trawling that reduce damage to the sea floor,
are great. Perhaps it’s time to re-think old school bottom trawling completely?
Bottom trawling has been banned on the inner parts of the Gulf for a long, long
time. We're introducing really quite significant restrictions on trawling further out in the Gulf,
and we're limiting that to trawl corridors. Trawl corridors? Like,
what are you talking about mate? There is no commercial trawling within the inner
gulf but what they do do is they trawl in here, here and here. So when we see the trawl corridors,
it's highly expected to be here, here and here.
This is the nursery
grounds for almost all of our species. Well one thing we've seen is that dredging has
been banned in the Inner Gulf for quite a while now and there are all sorts of communities
of marine life and epi fauna coming back on those sea floors. So we know that if you
do get away from that, all this life comes back and feeds the life above it. So there
just seems to be such an opportunity sitting there to get it out of the Gulf entirely.
Let’s learn more about artisanal fishing. A low impact, grassroots fishing method
that seems to offer good potential and support local communities.
He’s gone out to between Leigh and Little Barrier this morning. He had fifteen to
eighteen hundred hooks. It’s not really a lot…. It’s hard work. The fish don’t jump in the boat.
We catch them one at a time, look after each fish,
give it the best quality, it’s just a small boutique fishery.
What we would like to see is artisanal fishers. Local guys going out on a daily basis and then
selling the food back into the community. Leigh Fish is one of the main employers at Leigh,
has been since the 50s really. We believe we're doing it right. We believe we're doing it, ah,
with the best selectivity. We believe we've got the least environmental impact….
I think we could longline the whole bloody inshore.
I chose to value every single fish I caught by long line, handle them with the utmost care
and bring back the greatest value per single fish.
In my mind there is no conflict between commercial and conservation. It's in the
best interests of the commercial fishing industry that the stock remains there as
something that they can sustainably use. In whose interest is the sustainability of
New Zealand's fisheries the most important? It's most important
to the fishing industry really, right? It is in our best interests for the fishery
to be sustainable because if we bugger it up, we don't have a business tomorrow.
I say this respectfully, commercial guys have had a good run. You're looking at forty plus
years now. And the recreational guys as well. We all have. We all have. Even customarily.
Is this the right and proper way for human beings
to be interacting with the waters around New Zealand? Is this the best way? Or is this just a
further extension of the worst excesses of capitalism?
There are real pressures on the Gulf. It's hard to please everyone.
In 1985 the Quota Management System was introduced in an effort to arrest the steep decline of our
fish stocks. It’s legacy remains to be seen… The idea behind the Quota Management System
really arose in the 1950s when economists were really thinking about
the use of common property. Fish stocks all around the world were being hammered and collapsing.
And so the idea was, well, if you privatise the resource then the owner of it will look after
it because they have an interest to make sure that those stocks are healthy.
And it really took root in New Zealand because in the 1980s, our fish stocks were collapsing,
they were over harvested. If you were the owner of the fishing boat, you got allocated quota
based on your historic catch. If you were a part time fisher, you had already been cut
out of the industry and you got nothing and that was a lot of Maori, particularly in Northland.
But the large companies saw the opportunity. They bought and they didn't sell.
And so that quota was just accumulated in those companies and it wasn't possible to buy it back,
and it was too expensive. So the fishermen then had to
basically rent the quota, which put them in a very weak position.
Every system could have a few tweaks here and there, but the core of it is really strong.
Where the stock’s in trouble, we manage down. If a stock's robust and can take more sustainability
extraction, then it should go up. It's an excellent management tool and I think if
we got rid of it would be a national tragedy. What's happened over the years,
it's been concentrated in a small number of commercial groups.
Their purpose is to maximize the rent income from that property.
What basis is that for resource management? They gave property rights over the fish in
perpetuity to a handful of companies and fishermen. In perpetuity.
What are the challenges we face with the QMS and are there solutions
through evolution. Or is revolution? There's a real tension between seeing the
value of fish being available in the ocean for a kai [Kai - food] versus
only realising the value of fish once they've been caught and sold and turned into money.
These guys fishing behind us here are receiving, per kilogram
for fish, about half of what we did in the early 80s. What would happen here, if you were to
unshackle these guys from the quota system, is that they would fish for local consumers
by and large. They would have the ability for this time of the day to tie the boat up to a berth
at the wharf there. Open it up. They have their fish so they can maximise income from every fish.
What is the point of owning this property if it can't earn you any money?
So what we need to see is the removal of the private asset,
and it needs to be replaced with a licencing structure so that these guys can continue to fish
but we're much more reactive to the needs of the environment.
The open market value of fifty tonnes of scallop quota is 1.9 million dollars.
So our proposal is that we buy it back, and we reset with a licencing scheme.
But that licencing scheme comes with restraints. There won't be scallop dredging because we know
the destructive nature of that. But it's got to start with getting these quota owners on board
and actually creating a pathway or an exit ramp so that they are remunerated accordingly.
What’s been the impact for tangata whenua?
That's what the fisheries settlement did. It brought a new way,
a new beginning for Maori to be in a commercial, wealth growing creation stream.
I think there wouldn't be a Quota Management System if the quota shares had not been used as
the currency to settle commercial Māori claims. That's made it extremely difficult now, because
there's a conflict for Maori, which they have yet to resolve, between the need to maximise their
renting capacity from the property they received, and the well-being of their hapu and their people
on the coast who simply want to go fishing for a feed and exercise their customary rights.
It seems that over time the business of fishing has had
impacts and still presents challenges like… how do we allocate the rights to
fish that are functionally extinct? Perhaps science can give us some guidance.
One of the major problems with the Quota Management System is for it to work well,
it has a very high requirement for information, for science. And unless
you've got that science to feed into the system, the outcomes are rubbish.
I think some very good marine science is done in New Zealand and colleagues overseas would agree
with that. You know, like in the fisheries space, I think New Zealand's got a really good name.
The scientists struggle with, with how to assess fish under the water. It’s like counting trees
in a plot. But the trees move and you can't see them. So that's… it’s a real uncertain science
and it's really difficult to do so Our data, right from the start, has been
targeted at preventing a species from becoming extinct, not protecting an ecosystem function.
The numbers need to be much, much higher than what is currently being tabled.
We can still pull 80 tonnes of crayfish out of the sea and sell it commercially,
and crayfish are functionally extinct inside the Hauraki Gulf. How does that make sense?
In what world does it make sense to go out and hunt tigers and sell them in cans?
You know, it doesn't work. So who does all the science?
We don't actually collect our own science. The government collects the money from us
and then they allocate it out to the contracted people to provide the science.
It costs a lot to go and estimate the stocks of the deep water fish.
I mean, New Zealand’s a little bit unusual
in that most of the cost of science is recovered from the fishing industry.
OK, that's, that's almost unique.
Jeremy Helson: You know, the total economic contribution
to New Zealand of fisheries is something like 5.4 billion a year. The seafood industry pays
probably close to 35 million dollars a year, in their vest to the Crown.
0.6% contribution to research by the seafood industry.
Overall are we doing enough research? (Funny face) Are we asking the right questions?
I do agree that research costs have been stagnant for the last couple of decades.
The reality is that the work done by NIWA…
…not even my colleagues tell me what the answer is because the answer comes from the data. It doesn't
come from politics and I certainly never have anyone from the fishing industry ringing me up,
demanding, because they've paid for that result that they'll get that result. You
know, we've got limited budget and I think we do well with what we've got,
but we need a lot more to really understand what's going on.
We don't need science to put in place protection measures, or to reduce
fishing activities that we know are impactful in order to restore the ecosystem. And those are
the kind of measures that we could easily be enacting or putting in place now.
The evolution of industrial fishing and fisheries management should be a priority,
by the sounds of it. Habitat and species have disappeared before our eyes.
Rightio. Next up is recreational fishing.
Surely it’s my right as a Kiwi to gather a feed. There’s no harm in that is there?
We’ll see… Coming up… ________________