Culture of silence or a cover-up?
An oyster-killing parasite was first discovered in samples from an aquaculture facility run by New Zealand’s largest independently owned science organisation. Why did it take three years to come out and why, even now, will the Ministry for Primary Industr
This ‘‘is the start of something very significant,’’ Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy said in April 2015, at the official opening of a new mussel hatchery near Nelson. Guy was the star guest at the launch of the Shellfish Production and Technology New Zealand (SPATnz) facility at Cawthron Aquaculture Park, at Glenduan, just north of Nelson. The purpose-built hatchery had a bright future, considering the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and seafood giant Sanford had committed $13 million each to the venture.
The hatchery ticked all the Government’s boxes. It was a regional research facility focused on high-value shellfish, built to produce reliable, yearround supplies of baby mussels, or spat, to be farmed in ever-increasing numbers and sent overseas.
‘‘It just goes to show how much Nelson has going for it in terms of science, technology and innovation,’’ Guy gushed, according to a Nelson Mail report.
What Guy didn’t mention was that another significant event was happening at Cawthron Aquaculture Park.
Newsroom can reveal that scientific experts considered the aquaculture park to be infected in a hushed-up biosecurity outbreak being investigated by Guy’s ministry. The biosecurity response delayed the construction of SPATnz hatchery’s outdoor ponds, used as a landbased nursery.
In January 2015, three months before SPATnz’s opening, the oyster-killing parasite Bonamia ostreae was discovered in samples from the Cawthron facility, which was breeding several different shellfish species – potential carriers of the parasite – in the hope of commercialising the research for farming. Taxpayers funded the research to the tune of millions of dollars, under Sir John Key’s Government (see details below).
The ministry was duty-bound to inform the Paris-based World Organisation of Animal Health (OIE) about Bonamia ostreae’s discovery, which it did, in February 2015. Yet the ministry – and the minister – failed to tell the New Zealand public.
Last year, Bonamia ostreae’s existence exploded into public view. The parasite was confirmed at a Stewart Island oyster operation – a joint venture involving SPATnz owner Sanford. With a threat to the Foveaux wild oyster fishery, the ministry moved swiftly – and publicly. Oyster farmers were ordered to remove their operations from Big Glory Bay. Farms in Marlborough’s Tory Channel and Port Underwood – infected since at least 2015 – got the same order.
So why was there two years of silence? The ministry’s hush-hush approach to the 2015 discovery might be seen as prudent – a Government that didn’t want to unnecessarily spook offshore markets and protect the reputation of one of the country’s top research facilities. But a cynic’s view is it’s a sign of an uncomfortable intimacy between regulator and industry; that the ministry was too close to the industry it was funding and promoting.
Newsroom’s investigation has found the ministry discarded advice from scientific and technical experts to remove Marlborough’s infected farms and restrict the movement of aquaculture vessels and equipment used there.
It looks suspiciously like a cover-up, says former Stewart Island oyster farmer Rodney Clark, whose business was destroyed by the outbreak.
(The ministry’s director of readiness and response Geoff Gwyn, who has chaired the Bonamia ostreae response since late 2016, says he’d be surprised if there was a conscious decision not to publicise the outbreak. He suggests that because flat oyster farming was a small industry, and the infection was confined to a relatively small area, there was little the public could do to help.)
Newsroom’s investigation has found the ministry discarded advice from scientific and technical experts to remove Marlborough’s infected farms and restrict the movement of aquaculture vessels and equipment used there. Those same experts raised concerns about ‘‘major biosecurity flaws’’ at Cawthron’s aquaculture park.
Despite repeated requests for interviews, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor and the former minister, Guy, failed to front – although Guy’s office provided a written statement. In 2003, a former paua fisherman, Southlander Rodney Clark, took an interest in farming flat oysters, starting a 14-year obsession that would take him to Big Glory Bay and, ultimately, commercial ruin.
New Zealand’s aquaculture industry was pioneered in the 1960s and was dominated by mussels, Pacific oysters and king salmon. The flat oyster, known to Ma¯ori as tio, and also called the Bluff oyster or dredge oyster, is prized for its meat and flavour, compared to the Pacific oyster, which is fast-growing and bigger but milder-tasting.
There had been attempts in New Zealand to farm flat oysters, with little commercial success, as the endemic parasite Bonamia exitiosa, a close relative of Bonamia ostreae, periodically took hold and caused huge die-offs. But get it right and the payoffs are huge. Mussels sell for cents, but oysters generally go for dollars apiece.
Farming also has an advantage over the Bluff oyster boats, trawling Foveaux Strait for the prized delicacy. Wild oysters take between four and six years to reach commercial size but modern farming methods, like baskets, can grow mature oysters in 12 to 18 months.
Clark’s interest in oysters came after the Labour Government’s moratorium on new marine farming consents, imposed in 2001, after aquaculture’s rapid expansion in the 1990s. As much of the industry stood still, Clark beavered away perfecting his breeding techniques and ensuring his oysters would have a tolerance to Bonamia.
(Oysters are bivalves – named after their two-part, hinged shells – a group of molluscs including mussels, cockles, scallops and pipi. They feed by straining plankton from the water through their gills – making them susceptible to infected water. In the wild, oyster babies, known as spat, often cling to shells, even those of other fish, after being released in the water.)
The business side of things didn’t go perfectly, however. Clark’s first company crashed into receivership, after investors shunted him aside. But Clark and wife Dee kept pushing.
According to The Southland Times, the couple lived in the smoko room of the old Ocean Beach meatworks in Bluff – their business’s hatchery and nursery – for three years, ‘‘with no hot water, taking showers with buckets’’.
In 2013, Clark announced that the New Zealand’s Bluff Oyster Company – a name picked for its marketing appeal – had cracked the secret to farming Bluff oysters for export, but needed water to farm in. Later that year, it found a home in Big Glory Bay, a 12-square-kilometre bay accessed through Stewart Island’s Paterson Inlet, using consents from a mussel-farming company.
(In 2008, when regulatory changes put Environment Southland in charge of environmental monitoring, there were 36 consented marine farm sites in the bay – making it the province’s most intensively farmed site. The bay has been commercially fished for salmon since 1981 and green-lipped mussels since 1987.)
In February 2015, a day after the ministry notified the Paris-based OIE about Bonamia ostreae being found, Aquaculture New Zealand chief executive Gary Hooper sent an email telling his industry of the infection ‘‘on 3 sites at the top of the South Island’’. The ministry’s Richard Fraser updated the industry on the results from emergency sampling, undertaken to see if the parasite had spread. (It hadn’t, at that stage.)
In March, a concerned Clark emailed Fraser, to demand the ministry ensure no oyster spat or larva was sent to Southland from Nelson and Marlborough. ‘‘Like all biosecurity investigations and response we are taking this very seriously,’’ Fraser told Clark, adding ‘‘to date no movements outside the affected area have been permitted since the response started’’.
The ministry called a meeting in Invercargill in June, to discuss restrictions on oysters movements, to stop the parasite spreading.
‘‘I wanted everything shut down,’’ Clark recalls. ‘‘I didn’t want any way we could get anything here.’’
Oyster movements were restricted on June 10.
‘‘At the time I didn’t have any qualms about it,’’ Clark says. ‘‘We thought we’d been told everything, we really did. I thought they were being up front with us.’’
Clark returned to growing his business, through the business of growing, as suspected ‘‘human vectors’’ moved infected material 900 kilometres south. Signs of infection take months to show up in oysters, so it’s unclear when the movements, unintentional or deliberate, were made. (As reported last month, the ministry’s investigation turned up no illegal activity.)
On May 31 last year, the ministry contacted New Zealand’s Bluff Oyster Company to say it was one of two Big Glory Bay farms to test positive for Bonamia ostreae. (In fact, only Sanford’s farm tested positive, ‘‘with high prevalence’’. In initial tests, two of Clark’s 50 oysters had tested positive. But in September, the ministry told Clark subsequent testing at the Animal Health Laboratory – done in May – showed one sample was negative and the other inconclusive.)
Nine days later, Clark’s company received the devastating news that its oysters and equipment had to be removed. The business was finished. Clark predicted his company’s 2018 production would have eclipsed that of the Foveaux fishery’s seasonal catch, of roughly 10 million animals. Instead, tonnes of his precious oysters and baskets were lifted out of Big Glory Bay and carted off to be buried in landfill.
As his business was winding up, and compensation claims were being lodged, Clark wondered how it had come to this. The more he dug, the more he came back to one place – Cawthron Aquaculture Park.
Chance discovery
Bonamia ostreae’s discovery in 2015 happened by chance. It wasn’t found by a diligent Government lab technician or uncovered by an observant border official, suspicious at finding a lesionridden, yellowing oyster. Rather, an Otago University PhD student found it while studying the other Bonamia, exitiosa, at the ministry’s Animal Health Laboratory in Wallaceville, Upper Hutt. The student found Bonamia ostreae in Cawthron Aquaculture Park samples taken from Marlborough Sounds oyster farms in May and August 2014. He called the ministry’s biosecurity hotline on January 30, 2015.
The ministry refuses to confirm Cawthron was infected. Compliance investigation manager Gary Orr says it doesn’t comment in detail on compliance investigation and won’t identify anyone involved.
‘‘We cannot confirm or deny whether Cawthron were involved in this investigation.’’
However, Newsroom found confirmation of Cawthron’s infection in a ministry document published last year.
Cawthron Institute’s chief commercial officer Stuart Cooper says it was one of many organisations that cooperated with the ministry’s investigation.
‘‘MPI is the only organisation that we are aware of that will have all the facts. We genuinely believe you need to seek the answers to the questions you have from MPI. They have data from Cawthron as well as many other organisations.’’
In June 2015, as aquaculture stock transfers from Nelson and Marlborough were banned, the ministry convened a technical advisory group of six experts to advise its response controller.
The group’s report, released to Newsroom under the Official Information Act, contains a scathing assessment of Cawthron’s response to Bonamia ostreae – even suggesting legal action be taken to bring the park’s practices into line. Names in the report have been redacted, but it’s clearly referring to Cawthron Aquaculture Park, or CAP.
The report said the aquaculture park’s new biosecurity plan and procedures failed to address ‘‘major biosecurity flaws’’, and there was an ‘‘unacceptably high risk of release of B ostreae at the site’’ because of its design and engineering. Existing shellfish hadn’t been destroyed, there was no thorough decontamination of the pipework and water supply and flat oysters from infected sites had been reintroduced to the site without being assessed for disease. In particular, the site’s water supply wasn’t ‘‘biosecure’’, as inlet and outlet mixing was allowed, making it ‘‘certain that organisms are living in the drain’’.
During a visit, the expert group even witnessed Cawthron staff violating its new biosecurity plan.
‘‘All bivalves on site are a risk,’’ the report said.
Green-lipped mussels and Pacific oysters – potential carriers of the parasite – had already been transferred to the North Island, the report noted. Allowing movements of potentially infected bivalve species from within the ‘‘contained zone’’ was likely to spread the disease, the experts warned.
The group was unimpressed Cawthron was keen to claim it was, or wished to be, free of Bonamia ostreae, ‘‘with no evidence to support that assertion’’.
At the time, it still had flat oysters onsite and was applying to bring in flat oysters from infected in-sea sites.
‘‘It would appear that the only way to change practices at [redacted] will require legal means.’’
A bright spot for Cawthron was the good biosecurity controls noted at one part of the site, possibly the SPATnz hatchery opened by Nathan Guy in April. It was ‘‘potentially able to be a separate compartment’’ from the rest of the facility with ‘‘little additional investment’’, the report said.
The experts recommended the ministry treated the aquaculture park as an infected site, and should only be declared free of Bonamia ostreae after two years of clear tests.
MPI’s Gwyn thought that might have been achieved. But the ministry’s press office says all infected sites in NelsonMarlborough were depopulated – ‘‘so there is nothing further to test’’.
Removing farms ‘extreme’
Among the 2015 advisory group’s key recommendations were removing oysters and equipment from infected Marlborough farms and adding commercial aquaculture vessels and equipment to the restrictions. Those recommendations weren’t followed.
Gwyn says removing the infected Marlborough farms would have been ‘‘extreme’’ and the decision to restrict shellfish movement ‘‘was the appropriate one, given the circumstances’’.
The ‘‘game-changer’’ in 2017 was Bonamia ostreae’s proximity to the Foveaux fishery.
Former minister Guy, who was briefed on the decision, says a full risk assessment was done and a controlled area notice was thought to provide the necessary safeguards. Yet, privately, the ministry was worried about the risks from farm equipment movements. In March 2016, the ministry’s Dunedin team manager Allen Frazer responded to concerns from Southland oyster farmers about the spread of Bonamia ostreae by saying ‘‘most, if not all, oysters’’ from the top of the south were destined for a plate or overseas. He added: ‘‘The likelihood of an oyster travelling south and ending up in the sea is very low. For example, our assessment is that equipment (eg, farming and fishing gear) may be a higher risk pathway.’’
Guy also says commercial considerations played no part in the decision, which he said was based on ‘‘science and risk mitigation’’.
But that’s contradicted on multiple occasions by ministry emails.
In May 2015, the ministry’s Richard Fraser, a senior analyst in the aquaculture unit, wrote to aquaculture industry figures: ‘‘MPI must consider, assess and manager the legal, trade, reputational and biosecurity risks at all stages of this response.’’
A month earlier, Fraser said the response ‘‘aims to minimise negative impacts to the aquaculture industry, wild fisheries, the environment, sociocultural values and trade’’.
The same email trumpeted ‘‘No trade implications have been raised by our trading partners’’ – his emphasis.
Another jarring point was Fraser’s comment, made to Bluff oyster farmer Clark in March 2015, that ‘‘no movements outside the affected area have been permitted since the response started’’.
Gwyn tells Newsroom there was freedom of movement before June 2015, when the controlled area notice was imposed, so it’s possible that contaminated oysters were taken to Stewart Island legally.
Seafood giant Sanford confirms that’s true.
Chief operating officer Greg Johansson, who has just retired, says spat from Nelson/Marlborough was transferred to its Stewart Island oyster farm joint venture prior to Bonamia ostreae being found.
Newsroom approached Sanford’s former Southland manager Tommy Foggo, who retired to Clyde last September, to ask what he knew about spat movements, but he refused to comment. Sanford’s joint venture partner, Tio Oysters, which ran the operation’s oyster hatchery, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Is former minister Guy satisfied enough was done to track the movement of oysters before and after controls were put in place? He wouldn’t say.