Reeling over loss of wild fish spots
GET your fresh, wild caught seafood while you can.
That’s the message from third generation Bowen-based commercial fisherman Terry Must.
Mr Must has been fishing commercially for 35 years. He said in that time his access to fishing waters off Bowen had been cut by 50 per cent.
“We’ve lost half of the area we used to be able to fish,” he said.
He said governments and green groups had been nibbling away at the commercial fishing sector for the past 20 years. He warns it could reach the stage where the consumption of wild caught seafood in Australia becomes a thing of the past.
He was reeling this week from the commercial seafood sector’s latest kick to the gills.
This was the appraisal made by the Australian Marine Conservation Society that some mouth- watering delicacies from the ocean depths were “high risk”.
The AMCS’s Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide has declared scallops, Moreton Bay bugs and prawns high risk. It is a sentiment not shared by Mr Must.
Tooni Mahto is the AMCS’s fisheries and threatened species campaign manager.
She told the Townsville Bulletin the “risk” definition included other factors and did not only focus on the population numbers of indi- vidual species. She said “risk” included the transparency of fishery management and the impacts the methods used to catch these species had on the wider, marine environment.
Ms Mahto said Queensland needed to lift its game when it came to providing evidence it was doing the right thing by the marine environment.
She said the state had a “red” rating – the equivalent of an “F” for failure – when it came to providing proof that it was harvesting seafood in an environmentally responsible manner. She said the only state that had a “green” score was South Australia.
“The Australian public increasingly expects their seafood to be caught without a high cost to our marine wildlife,” Ms Mahto said.
“There are green trawl areas in South Australia, but we are not quite there yet in Queensland. There is a lot more to be found out about the impacts of commercial fishing in Queensland.”
Ms Mahto said her organisation was not anti- commercial fishing. There was room for commercial fishing in Queensland, but added more needed to be known about the operational methods of the industry.
Mr Must said professional fishers were being “hammered” on all fronts.
“It’s like they are just picking us off, one species at a time when it comes to seafood they want to protect,” he said.
“Where do we end up? Do we just import all of our seafood?”