Making the most of our resources

Snapper - A valuable (and tasty) resource.

A few years ago, I worked for a company that had a limited product to sell. Once we had sold out, we wouldn't have a business anymore. As a result the owner went for a premium pricing model. Rather than trying to sell the products as quickly as possible, he tried to maximise the income that he could make per sale.

I also worked for a sports supplement company, where we had a high quality product. We were reasonably confident that we had the best product on the market, and as a result we decided not to compete on price with other similar products, but instead sell at a premium price.

It is sometimes good business sense to make a smaller profit in the short term to ensure a bigger profit in the long term.

New Zealand has a large maritime area. In that area is a large number of fish. That number is finite, but it is capable of being a renewable resource. Currently of the 125 fishstocks, the Ministry of Fisheries believes that 21 are overfished to the point where their numbers are not increasing. This is quite good news, because it means that we are managing 104 of them quite well.

Commercial fishing is an important industry in New Zealand. It is valuable for a number of reasons. It provides employment in areas without many other options for jobs. It provides more than a billion dollars in export earnings, and the government takes a significant quantity of money in quota sales.

However I feel that there are currently there are some issues with the return that we get from fishing. Firstly the way that we gather the fish is largely through seining and trawling. These two methods of catching fish result in a large by-catch and do significant damage to the fish in the process of catching them. As a result any fish that are not wanted are not often able to be returned to the sea alive, and when they are, they are often in poor condition and unlikely to survive.

While the quotas have not been fully filled recently, they only relate to fish that are brought into shore. Any fish that are killed, but dumped at sea don't count towards the quota system.

The two large net-based fishing techniques also require large boats, and reasonably large crews, but take tonnes and tonnes of fish. The third common method of fishing is deep water long-lining.

There are some issues with surface long-lining, but as most of New Zealand's commercially targeted fish (other than tuna) are bottom dwellers, the type of long-lining I'm talking about is deep water long lines, not surface long lines.

Long-lining can be done by smaller boats, with smaller crews. It has a significantly smaller by-catch, and (depending on how long the line is down for) is less likely to damage the fish. There are still some ecological issues with long-lining, but it is generally much less damaging to the environment than either trawling or seining. It is also a lot less efficient.

It's uncommon for a long-line vessel to come back with more than a tonne of fish, whereas it's unusual for a seiner or trawler to come back with less than a tonne of fish.

The fish that they catch, however, fetches a different price. Because the fish is damaged by the nets, fish caught by either trawling or seining tends to earn less money. A commercial fisherman I talked to said that he believed it averaged out to about $1.20 per kg for net caught snapper. The average for fish caught on a long-line was about $2.00 per kg. This difference in price isn't enough to convince most of the commercial fishing companies to switch to long-line based fishing, as the costs are much higher, and it is much less efficient.

However the fish stocks are actually not owned by the fishing companies. They are owned by the country. It's only when we allow fishermen to take them out of the sea that they belong to the fishing companies.

Ideally we would also make sure there was a significant number of fish available for commercial charter fishermen to catch. A 3kg snapper might bring in a total of $40 to the country if it's caught in a seine net. Now imagine that same fish was caught by a tourist on a charter boat. That tourist has paid $150 to go on the charter, takes a photo with that fish and posts that photo online. It's seen by a number of people, and one of them decides to come out to New Zealand to go on a fishing holiday. The fish has now earned hundreds of dollars for the country, and yet it's been returned to the sea and is still swimming around, ready to be caught again one day. I believe that the second of these two scenarios is significantly better than the first.

If we were to move to ban seining and trawling we would potentially see a number of things happen:

1. The price of fish would go up. As fish would be costlier to catch, they would become costlier to buy. There would be likely to be some complaining about this, but realistically the companies need to make a profit.

2. More people would be employed as the only way to get fish would be more labour intensive. I'm not sure how this is a bad thing for the country.

3. There would be a reduction in our export earnings. The total revenue from fishing would likely decrease as the total fish catch would reduce. However the majority of the world's fish stocks are in a far worse state than ours, and so it would only be a matter of time before this rectified itself.

4. The by-catch would decrease significantly. This might lead to some issues with ecosystem balancing, where some of the fish that are non-target species (such as barracuda) might start to breed too quickly. However having too many fish is a better problem than not enough of them.

5. The price of quotas would decrease. If companies are unlikely to fulfill them, they are less likely to pay for them. As a result the cost of entry to the fishing market would decrease. The take to the government in the short term would be significantly hit (my back of envelope economics suggest it could be by as much as a hundred million dollars in the short term) but this would be an investment in a much more prosperous industry in the future.

6. It is almost impossible to overfish an area using just long-lining if there is a sufficient number of fish there in the first place. Only using long-lines would make a massive positive difference to our maritime ecological sustainability.

The idea of banning seining and trawling is a costly and difficult one for a government to take, but it would be one that would have significant long term benefits for the country.

Seining and trawling currently are the most efficient way for fishing companies to take fish. However they are not the best way for New Zealand to allow our fish to be taken. As a country we can be making more out of fishing, by allowing more jobs and more money per fish that is removed, while improving the long term ecological management of the fish stocks at the same time. One very good way to do this is by banning seining and trawling.