This week is the first of the 2024/25 fishing year. Last Sunday we got the release of the latest sustainability round decisions from the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries. Not everyone is happy, but can they be?
Cooking fish is easy. Pan-fried with butter is the answer to how to make the most of a huge number of New Zealand species. It's easier than cooking an egg.
Sadly, the decisions about how to manage our fisheries are not so easy. Far from it. To start with, there are 98 species in the Quota Management System, divided into 642 separate fish stocks, each in its own quota management area.
On Sunday, Minister Jones, the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries, released the latest sustainability round decisions to guide the new fishing year starting on 1 October.
Eighteen stocks were included in the round. Thirteen of these saw increases to catch limits (Total Allowable Commercial Catch or TACC limits) and five saw decreases. On the face of it, this is a win for commercial fishers, who are the ones on the water seeing every day how fish stocks are thriving or not. But a dig into just one of the management areas shows how complicated the true picture is.
Let's take snapper area 2 (SNA2) for example. This area extends from Cape Runaway on the top of the East Cape to Titahi Bay north of Wellington on the west coast.
The Minister increased the Total Allowable Catch for all fishing and related mortality for SNA2 by 30%. The Ministry recommended this option because it would support an increase in recreational catch limits that better reflect what the reccies are actually catching. It also pointed out that "increased landings of snapper could provide approximately $990,000 more in revenue compared to the 2022/23 fishing year."
We are grateful for this decision. The management settings in this fishery have not been reviewed for 21 years - a generation. And for the last ten years, industry has funded a lot of science to prove what we knew anecdotally - that snapper numbers were going through the roof.
Then for the past three years, Seafood New Zealand has funded an analysis measuring catch per unit effort (CPUE). That analysis was taken through Fisheries New Zealand's working groups where scientific experts consider assessments and whether they are of a high enough standard to input into changes in Total Allowable Catch limits.
The Ministry for Primary Industry's (MPI) inshore science working group agreed that the northern portion of the stock has "increased by about 4 times from the low period between 2010 and 2016."
Snapper has become a 'choke species', meaning that there are so many of them, our fishers are catching them without wanting to and were going above their total allowable catch and having to pay deemed values (effectively a fine) as a result. It also made it hard to catch their full allowance of other species because snapper was getting in the way, hence the term 'choke species', because it can choke your access to the full range of species.
The Minister followed MPI advice and selected Option 3, which was the 30% TAC increase for snapper.
But it was a different story in the same area for another species. The Minister also decided to reduce TACC for John dory by around 50% (from 269.5 to 135 tonnes). He was responding to concerns raised by Fisheries New Zealand (MPI) that the stock may be below its management target.
But this is where it gets complicated. Firstly, no assessment has been done since 2022, before Cyclone Gabrielle, so we have no idea how that weather event has affected the fishery. Secondly, it seems that the only information supporting the decrease in catch limits comes from the east coast of the North Island. No information is available on trends on the west coast, where around half the John dory catch is taken.
Fisheries New Zealand (MPI) admits that there may well be a difference between the two stocks and says they are open to a conversation about whether the quota management area boundaries are right.
In the meantime though, fishers will be hurting as a result of this decision. It will increase costs for them and means that instead of snapper being the 'choke species' that fishers need to try and avoid, it may now be John dory. Fisheries New Zealand acknowledges that "this could reduce the efficiency and flexibility of commercial operators in the area."
Nothing in this life is ever simple, and that is particularly true of managing fisheries. What we really want is more science, so that no one is having to guess, and a more agile system that can respond faster to new information. Not having good information means decisions are often precautionary and while the fishery will be just fine, commercial fishers might not be.
