World-leading seafood industry
New Zealand is internationally recognised as having one of the world’s best managed fisheries.
That is according to John Connelly, the United States National Fisheries Institute president, who is a keynote speaker at today’s Seafood NZ conference, to be opened at Te Papa by Prime Minister John Key.
New Zealand’s performance is underpinned by its Quota Management System (QMS), now in its 30th year. That has seen a shift from overfishing, with no limits on catches, to healthy fish stocks where 97 per cent of our annual catch is above sustainable limits set by fisheries scientists within the Ministry for Primary Industries.
Auckland University academics led by Dr Glenn Simmons and Professor Nigel Haworth, who is also Labour Party president, believe otherwise.
They argued (August 29) that the QMS has failed.
This can be seen as part of a campaign that launched in May with a catch reconstruction report that Simmons and Haworth oversaw that alleged the actual New Zealand catch over 61 years was 2.7 times that reported to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
That report is a highly politicised document that was circulating among political, environmental and recreational lobby groups before its release.
It relies heavily on anonymous interviews under what its authors term a ‘‘critical realist’’ approach and some MPI compliance investigations into specific but limited issues.
Its opaque findings and the arbitrary attributions of his estimates to species and sectors for the period have been disputed by international scientists, MPI and Niwa. Some of its claims are laughable, such as an alleged recreational catch of 6785 tonnes of deepwater orange roughy.
Environmentalists used the report as a club to assail the seafood industry, including attempting to bully McDonald’s into boycotting New Zealand hoki in what was tantamount to an act of economic sabotage.
There are omissions in the Simmons et al prescription that are telling. It seems anything that does not fit the we-know-best and you-are-not-to-be-trusted agenda is discarded.
That means the fact New Zealand seafood is in high demand in international markets and that exports are at a record high is ignored.
In the year to June exports were $1.78 billion, a rise of 15 per cent on the previous year. That is more than the much vaunted wine industry earns. In any case the QMS was designed to ensure sustainability, not to increase value, although that is an outcome.
It is nonsense to claim New Zealand is not adding value to its catches. Orange roughy are exported whole to China, earning twice the value of the fillets alone. Live rock lobsters have grown to a $300 million industry, an extraordinary success.
Mussels are exported in half shells and have become a $200 million industry. New Zealand is the world’s largest producer of king salmon, which sells at a premium.
The Tiaki brand launched this year includes a smartphone app that shows discerning consumers how and where the fish was caught.
Precision Seafood Harvesting is delivering live fish to the boat. Fish roes and livers are harvested for nutreceuticals.
Those market successes should be recognised and celebrated. The economy of this small, remote country depends on what we can sell to the world. That helps support our envied way of life.
We can agree with our determined detractors on some aspects.
No system is perfect and while the QMS is fundamentally sound and has served us well, it can always be improved.
The seafood sector will become increasingly important as a provider of top quality protein – enough for 2.3 billion meals annually on present production.
Ours are mixed fisheries and with high quality, highly desirable protein comes an amount of lesser quality and less wanted by-catch. Dealing with that by-catch in a cost-effective manner has long proved a difficult area and all companies are investing in research to derive value from the material.
Fishing is a complex industry influenced by many factors, that is shared with recreational and customary interests.
As such it would be ideally overseen by a standalone ministry, as was previously the case, rather than subsumed in the wider primary industries sector. Institutional knowledge has been lost.
Simmons and his colleagues are right to question increasing compliance, including cameras across the fleet, without addressing underlying discarding issues. That is only focusing on the symptoms and not the causes.
MPI is aware of that and is proposing a future of fishing approach that encompasses vessel tracking and electronic reporting and monitoring aimed at increasing transparency and reassuring a sceptical public.
That programme will also need to examine policy options and the setting of catch limits.
That is one of many issues facing an industry that is in good heart, that has strong prospects but also no shortage of challenges.
A challenge in turn for the academics and their environmental activist colleagues is acknowledging the progress that continues to be made, rather than continually bagging those out on the water adding to the health and wealth of the country.
Tim Pankhurst is chief executive of Seafood New Zealand.