The downside of commercial bravery

It must have hurt like hell.

The commercial oyster farms off Stewart Island have been mortally smitten by the latest bonamia outbreak.

Not by the actual infection of bonamia ostreae, which only some of them appear to have, but by the implacable official decision that the risk of infection pressure on the large natural fishery of oysters growing wild in Foveaux Strait is intolerable.

The strait’s oysters are still, mercifully, reported to be free from the new strain. Given that these provide the huge majority of the oysters in which the nation rejoices, the loss of a few dozen jobs from a comparatively new industry in Stewart Island’s Big Glory Bay might seem like a regrettable, but at least small-scale, piece of bad news.

Except there’s more going on than that. The oyster farming was replete with a sense of potential. Now, sadly, we have a stark reminder that farmers and fishers are not always masters of their own destiny.

And this is even more emphatically true in the case of pioneering types. So up come the oysters, seemingly never to be replaced.

The prospect of compensation can mitigate, a bit, the loss of the industry as it exists at present.

The grief felt by those who have been developing the farms goes beyond changes to their own circumstances and the loss of the jobs they were able to provide thus far.

The work they have put in to reach this stage was at least as much about the future as the day-to-day. Each days’ work was undertaken with a vivid sense of possibility.

Dreams had become ambitions and plans, the pursuit of which entailed so much hard work and more than a little commercial bravery.

Some contend that farmed oysters could have been reared to saleable size more quickly than bonamia could take hold in them. Officialdom was either unconvinced or unprepared to hazard finding out.

To be fair, the wider public was itself far more inclined to be protective of the wild oyster stocks than willing to run much of a risk on behalf of the oyster farms.

Care needs to be taken in determining what lessons might be drawn from the miseries of the oyster farm saga.

In particular we need to resist projecting the bonamia issue on to investigations under way for other marine farm potential at the island, currently under investigation.

This is essentially focused on finfish.

While this industry raises its own set of ecological and other considerations, bonamia simply isn’t one of them.