Fisheries Ministry defends quota decisions

A state science company's disclosure that decisions on commercial fishing limits are essentially guesswork and "highly susceptible to influence" has triggered an assurance from the Fisheries Ministry that annual decisions on fish catch limits are based on "the best available science".

The ministry's deputy chief executive for fisheries management, Gavin Lockwood, said yesterday that every year $20 million was spent on scientific research and stock assessments.

"We have sophisticated and well integrated fisheries research, management and monitoring systems that have been refined over the last 20 years," said Mr Lockwood.

He spoke out after the National Institue of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) chief fisheries scientist, John McKoy, told an online forum on the science behind fisheries management that the information used to set commercial catch limits needed to be improved.

"For most fish stocks we don't know much at all - in other words you guess," Dr McKoy said on the Science Media Centre briefing.

He said this meant the Fisheries Minister's annual decisions on commercial catch limits were ambiguous, informal and vulnerable to outside pressure.

"There's an opportunity to use better organised and better thought-through decision processes. The current process is highly susceptible to influence from vested interests," Dr McKoy said.

Fisheries research funding had more than halved since the mid 1990s, while the list of commercially fished species was growing each year. "Essentially less and less is known about more and more."

But Mr Lockwood said in a statement the quota management system (QMS) was regarded as one of the world's best, though the nation had to "carefully prioritise" spending on research that best met fisheries management needs.

About 70 percent of commercial catch came from assessed fishstocks.

"The QMS gets a lot of international attention because it gives fisheries managers effective tools to maintain healthy fishstocks and rebuild depleted stocks when required, he said.

But Dr McKoy said in the quota system, research targeted the most valuable species as those that interested fishing companies, who paid for the research.

"We distribute most of our resources in too few of our species," Dr McKoy said. Re-allocating the limited amount of money for fisheries research to less valuable species would provide information to make "better" decisions.

It was dangerous to ignore the lesser species because the impact on them could indirectly affect more profitable species.

Dr McKoy said the huge level of uncertainty in fisheries research was not going to change if funding was left as an industry responsibility.

An environmental lobbist, Forest and Bird marine conservation advocate Kirstie Knowles, applauded Dr McKoy for speaking out, and said ministers needed to be more cautious when setting catch levels.

Less than a fifth of fish stocks managed under the QMS had enough information available to assess their status, and about a third of those were overfished, depleted or collapsed.

For more than 80 per cent of our fish stocks, we have no idea about status and so setting catch levels is literally guesswork," she said in a statement.

The Fisheries Ministry only stepped in when stocks were fished down to 20 percent of their original levels, said Ms Knowles. Some stocks had been allowed to crash as low as 10 percent of original levels before fishing was closed.

"If we don't learn more about the fish in our seas and the complex food webs, we risk the collapse of other fisheries like orange roughy," she said. Dr McKoy's comments should be a "wake-up" for the fishing industry.