“THE protection of Australia’s fisheries is pushing seafood imports to record levels, driving overfishing in other countries and exposing consumers to unacceptable levels of antibiotics and other contaminants.
“Marine biologist Walter Starck said Australians were being forced to consume lower quality seafood imports, many from seriously depleted fisheries, even though Australia had a relative abundance in some species that was being underutilised.”
So begins the front page article entitled ‘Fish bans raise food poison risk’ in todays The Weekend Australian.
Yesterday Crikey.com.au ran a similar article citing figures from Walter Starck published at this blog in November 2005.
“Australia has the third largest territorial fishing zone … ‘green management’ has reduced our catch to the smallest in the OECD. We now import an ever-increasing amount of the fish we eat. Here are some fishery production figures (in metric tonnes) from 2003”
So, is there a chance we might see some policy changes? We don’t need to import fish. We shouldn’t be importing so much fish.
I see the current situation, at least in part, a consequence of the WWF Save the Reef Campaign. This campaign was explicitly about shutting down our northern fisheries and at the same time generating membership for WWF.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
The blue fin tuna is a good example of the problem. They might live in our waters for some time, but they are being over fished by the Japanese. They are now listed as being critically endangered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_bluefin_tuna
Management has been determined by scientific investigation of fish populations.
Just curious. From which country does Australia import mostly their seafood from? Norway, Vietnam, Chile???
SJT,
The southern bluefin tuna is indeed a good example. The stock was claimed to be heavily overfished and yet the Japanese were grossly exceeding their quota for years and still our fishermen are still able to catch their quota in only a few sets of their nets. This season their spotter planes are seeing more schoals than ever. Something is obviously badly wrong with the stock estimates.
The answer to my previous question was probably found in the Australian.
China, Vietnam and Thailand are big exporters to Australia.
Btw, I read that a big part of Vietnamese fish products are now certified ( think they were MSC certified).
Oops, I was wrong about the certified Vietnamese seafood.
According to Intrafish they have a good traceability of their seafood products.
Why don’t we just ask the CSIRO?
http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/threatened/species/southern-bluefin-tuna.html
“5. Conclusion
SBT continues to be overfished despite the international management arrangements which have been formally in place since 1994.
The parental biomass is currently in the order of 3 to 14% of that in 1960 (its unfished size). In addition, BRS has classified SBT as being ‘overfished’ every year since the first BRS fishery status reports were first produced in 1992.”
It’s 3 to 14% of it’s unfished size? Doesn’t sound good to me, and that the Japanese have been overfishing has been due to sheer bloody minded short sightedness.
Anne: By contrast to the lead above our Southern Ocean Fisheries are now under threat from northern hemisphere fleets. I suggest much of the catch is tied directly and indirectly to Japan.
http://www.asoc.org/what_sof.htm
Tasmanian Fisheries where there is a new threat from the deadly abalone virus that affects S.E. Australian waters. Tasmania is the largest abalone region by world standards.
http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/fisheries/tas/index.html
Note: The local tuna and pilchard industry runs largely out of Port Lincoln in SA.
Although farmed fish from both SA and Tasmanian is in ACT supermarkets all the time our largest chain of distributors depend on imports for the majority of sales in this inland region. Fresh water “Nile” perch from Africa and Bazza from Thailand also salt water Hoki from NZ via Asia dominate the counter displays.
Ooops – that Asian catfish is called Basa Sorry
This is one of the latest reports on testing
http://news.www31.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=175487&rss=yes
This situation drives me crazy.
At the supermarket shelf i search in vain for canned fish of Australian waters and Australian canning STANDARDS. I will not eat poisonous fish from Thailand.
SAFCOL used to mean South Australian Fisheries Co-Op Ltd.
Not anymore.
Fresh fish is not a daily option for people like me who live in remote locations.
Fresh local fish is hard to obtain on the coast too, the local co-op report catches down by 33% and have to fill the shelves with imports.
Rog, is the catch down 33% because 1. the quota has been reduced by about that much, 2. restrictions on areas where can fish make it harder to catch fish (e.g. new marine parks), or 3. because there are no fish?
PS. I was in Port Lincoln, South Australia, a couple of months ago and there was good local seafood/fish available at a reasonable price, on the NSW North Coast it always seems hard/impossible to find, in SE Queesland it is available but expensive.
No2 Jennifer, the new marine park has just come into effect.
Yes, the WWF – not the worthy cause it once was, for obvious reasons.
Paul: I wonder how your WWF comment is in anyway appropriate on this thread. Catch quotas and other fishing restrictions have come about here over decades from direct research by CSIRO and our state governments. A more recent event is the federal government involvement with major data acquisition.
There are good reasons for our go slow with all inshore fishing activity the most important is the link with catch declines and disturbed breeding grounds. See for example the mess with Tioxide, pulp mills and sewage discharging into our shallow seas.
For some fifty years I have followed the fortunes of inshore fishing fleets and their processors around the southern coastline. The most famous were our ‘couta’ boat fleets based in Victoria and Tasmania. For a hundred years or more they supplied local markets with fresh ‘barracouta’, Australian school ‘salmon’ and ‘School’ shark in season. Canners and freezers on both sides of the strait stored surplus catch. I recall it was Kraft that made couta into Bloater paste in the 60’s.
Sometimes I saw our couta boats converted to cray and scallop fishing. By the 80’s these fleets of little trawlers had been badly impacted by numbers of deep sea vessels including squid boats from Japan earlier cleaning up coastal waters and all interstate licensing systems had to be reviewed. During this later period I had lunch on one wharf as often as possible after a local export processor tipped me off where his fresh claw meat went on a daily basis after the best crayfish tails were snap frozen for the US.
http://www.siv.com.au/shark.htm
CSIRO (Olsen 1946-) recommended seasonal closures in some school shark puping areas were not implemented and heavy fishing went on until larger sharks were banned in the Victorian fish and chips trade stocks failed to meet expectations
A report by Bradshaw 2005 on the 1998 study scalefish fishery in Tasmanian waters including most of Bass Strait is here. Note the Tasmanian jurisdiction is a large one
http://www.utas.edu.au/tafi/PDF_files/Scalefishsocioecon_studyFINAL.pdf
Australians must ask why any foreign boats come fishing round our waters in the first place. The answer is simply to keep their costs down on processing our fish stocks. I guess too they are also prepared to eat mackerel which is another species like squid that has been ignored locally. Mackerel and mullet both have that offensive black inside lining.
I wonder if Walter above has caught, cleaned and had them for breakfast ant time lately.
Around here along with blackfish sea mullet us a big favourite and squid boats are a real sight out at sea.
Further Inland sea mullet gets good prices and is streets ahead of that tasteless stuff like hoki, or whatever.
But mullet is seasonal and other areas are now off limits.
Gavin – I was referring to: “I see the current situation, at least in part, a consequence of the WWF Save the Reef Campaign. This campaign was explicitly about shutting down our northern fisheries and at the same time generating membership for WWF.”
Paul
I see this blog being about shutting down AGW science and at the same time generating membership for the IPA.
This is a piece I wrote on the ‘WWF Save the Reef Campaign’ after it moved onto agriculture from fishing. At that time I didn’t have a clear picture of what had already happened to fishing.
http://www.ipa.org.au/files/wwftext.htm
From towards the end of the above link Gary Johns (was a Minister in the Paul Keating Labor Government) and I write:
“It is a dereliction of duty for governments to devise standards for water quality and runoff regimes without direct studies of impact. That some scientists would play along with them suggests that politics and science are no strangers. The issues could have been resolved if government had been prepared to scrutinize the evidence in the published scientific literature. Governments, however, appear increasingly reluctant, or lack the capacity, to assess information independently. Instead, they hand the referee’s whistle to self-interested aggrandisers like WWF.
WWF may have played a useful role in saving the Panda from Mao’s China, and the Siberian Tiger from the Soviets. But the Great Barrier Reef is arguably the best-protected coral reef in the world. The reason WWF suggests otherwise has more to do with raising its profile than protecting the Reef. The irony is that many reefs in the near north around Indonesia are under threat. As for the Australian campaign, WWF adds no value whatsoever to the science, awareness, or protection of the Reef. Two governments and a string of agencies already regulate activities within its vicinity.
WWF is a globalized multinational organization that wants to ensure its own survival, its own revenue sources. WWF is entirely dependent on maintaining a public profile and generating funding through offering up environmental disaster scenarios and dramatic statements about the catastrophic impacts of humans on the natural environment. In other words, it is a political entity. To the extent that it seeks to save the environment, it does not represent the environment, it represents people. These supporters have a view as to how the organization should operate; they have beliefs about the purpose of conservation that may be at odds with the rest of the community. Environmental NGOs represent activists, they do not represent the electorate, so it is imperative that governments are clear just whom NGOs, in this case WWF, purport to represent.
At present, WWF publishes in its Annual Reports a reasonable amount of information about its operations. These reports are available to the public. Half of WWF funding, however, comes either from AUSAID or from overseas, and this source of major funding, including funding from foreign governments, and from overseas fundraising, is not mentioned by name in the Annual Reports. We suggest that a more comprehensive body of data on NGOs that seek to influence public policy should be made available to the public and be scrutinized by governments. To this end, governments should establish a protocol against which groups that seeks significant access to government can establish their standing. The protocol would be an invitation to provide sufficient information upon which a government can make an informed judgement about whom it is dealing with. When a government grants standing to an organization, the data on which that standing was granted should be made available to the public. Such a process will enhance the transparency of government, and diminish the prospects of interest groups who simply use the cloak of superior motives of ‘doing good’, which may not be in the public interest (Johns, 2001).”
BTW I was once good friends with the person recruited to run the WWF Reef Campaign.
Gavin,
You’ve missed most of the politics.
The restrictions on the northern coral trout fishery may have been informed by CSIRO and delivered by the state and federal governments but they were driven largely by enviornmental campaigning in particular from the WWF.
SJT,
The WWF ‘Save the Reef Campaign’ was so ferocious and ‘prostituted science’ to such an extent it alienated many people … it indirectly resulted in the IPA offering me a job and indirectly resulted in Walter Starck writing the following which was also published by the IPA:
http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/publisting_detail.asp?pubid=414
Paul: This 2005 report from the CRC makes no mention of WWF and I suggest it flows like the UTAS one above. Tell me from your knowledge of WWF and background, WWF has likely influenced either outcome.
http://www.reef.crc.org.au/research/fishing_fisheries/statusfisheries/statusline.htm
“Commercial catch quotas for the east coast coral reef fin fish and Spanish mackerel fisheries were introduced on 1 July 2004, under the Fisheries (Coral Reef Fin Fish) Management Plan 2003 (the Plan) and the Fisheries Regulation 1994 (the Regulation) repectively. The new management arrangements limit the number of commercial operators licensed to fish in these fisheries in order to balance economic needs and ecological sustainability. Both these factors are vital to ensure long-term sustainability of the resources on which these fisheries depend”
“Prior to the introduction of the Plan in September 2003, there were about 1700 licenses able to catch reef fish. Of these, about 527 line-fishing boats operated in the GBRWHA for a total of about 35,000 primary boat fishing days. They caught 4,700 tonnes of fish worth $78 million. This catch comprised 1,000 tonnes of live coral trout (worth $35 million); 1,100 tonnes of dead coral trout (worth $17 million); 1,100 tonnes of red throat emperor (worth $10 million); and 1,600 tonnes of other species (worth $16 million). Another 500 tonnes of fish were caught by line fishers during about 5,300 primary boat days on Queensland’s east coast outside the GBRWHA, at a value of $4 million”.
rog: where is your squid catch consumed?
Jennifer: I see the GBR case in the same light as all other fisheries where fishermen and consumers demanded too much of the resource.
Gavin,
You rely too much on the newspapers! They only tell you a bit of the story.
Also, In which year was that CRC first funded? Who helped get it established and what did they do with the scientists they didn’t like?
Jennifer: my limited knowledge of the science causes me to look strictly at the interplay between federal and state departments charged with holding back on things like oil and gas searches in sensitive areas. My casual contacts were in say BMR or BRS as they were.
Other folks reading between the lines from another angle may appreciate the politics here.
http://eied.deh.gov.au/coasts/mpa/nrsmpa/regionalisation/data2.html
Gavin, You were making it up before. Now you are changing the subject. 🙂
Jennifer said “You were making it up before”
Where??
“Now you are changing the subject”
Hardly, my interest lies purely in what underpins our state or national outlook.
please read through those links again
And you should read the two links I provided. Sorry they are so long! 🙂
Gavin, I dont catch squid but it does sell well at the co-op and I’m sure it doesnt last 5 minutes down at blackwattle bay.
Baby octopus and squid tubes are mostly imported.
SJT,
Japan’s officials found that there had been overfishing, and they last year imposed a tight new regulatory framework on their fishermen by their own initiative, as well as agree to take a reduction in quota.
Questions have also been raised about “epoch making” growth rates observed in Australia’s catch (another explanation suggested was under-reporting, your guess is as good as mine). As I understand it Australia’s fishing methods catch younger fish than the long line technique favoured by Japanese fishing vessels, this is obviously bad for productivity.
Walter,
I was reading a book about the tuna “crisis” recently (in Japanese). The author talked to a range of people involved in the whole supply chain, and I recall that when he talked to the fishermen about the science they thought that the scientific models were unrealistic. I don’t remember exactly, but one fisherman reeled off multiple reasons why he had little faith in the science.
Seems like more cooperation between the scientists and fishermen is required in this area (not to mention possible regulatory improvements on the Australian side if the apparent under reporting is true)
Just regarding what I said, this from the CCSBT homepage (Recent News):
(quote) * Reviews of SBT farming and market data during 2006 suggest that southern bluefin tuna catches may have been substantially under-reported over the past 10-20 years. The impact of unreported catches on the estimates of past total catch and CPUE meant that it was not possible to proceed with the current Management Procedure, and that the Management Procedure needs to be re-evaluated.(end quote)
David,
The tuna fishermen in South Australia catch smaller fish and then fatten them for the Japanese market … so the meat is more tender. The fish they kill are huge.
They now get lots and lots more money for the same, larger, specially produced ‘marbled’ fish.
I don’t see anything wrong with this?
There is some comment on the practice following this blog post: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002033.html
I really need to write the whole story up … but how many hours are there in each day?
A few further facts:
The GBR line fishery harvest rate comes to only 9Kg/Km²/year. The average sustainable level for reef
fisheries is conservatively estimated to be 4000 Kg/Km²/year. One third of the GBR is protected from any
fishing by green zones and because of distance and prevailing weather most of the areas that are open to
fishing are rarely or never fished. Even on the most frequently fished reefs near population centres the most
heavily targeted species show no evidence of overfishing. The mean density of commercial fishing vessels on
the GBR is less than one vessel/4000Km²/day.
Australia has the largest fishing zone per capita in the world and yet 70% of domestic seafood consumption
is imported. All of the imports come from areas far more heavily fished than our own. The biggest supplier is
Thailand which produces over 10 times our catch from a fishery zone 1/20 as large. These imports cost $1.8
billion per year and are increasing rapidly. To pay for it we are selling off non-renewable mineral resorces to
buy something we have in abundance.
Our total fishery harvest rate is the lowest in the world at only 1/30 of the global average. Our total catch is
less than half that of New Zealand and is on a par with Poland, Italy and PNG. Bangladesh with only 1/74
the fishery zone of Australia produces four timer greater total catch.
Every week brings new reports of the health benefits of seafood and government is encouraging us to eat
more of it. Meanwhile or own fishing industry is in rapid decline from over regulation and our aquaculture has
been strangled at birth despite ideal natural conditions and its booming elsewhere all over the world. New
Zealand aquaculture production is twice as large as ours. Thailand’s is 30 timer larger.
Our bureaucrats call this travesty “sustainable” fisheries management and proclaim theirs to be the world’s
best. In reality we have the most restrictive, costly and least productive fisheries management in the world.
The management cost for commonwealth fisheries is over $100,000 a year per vessel.
The prevailing idea of our fisheries being threatned by widespread overfishing is utterly divorced from any
connection with reality but is a direct consequence of pandering to ill informed notions of environmentalism.
Australians are now paying for it with both their health and their pocketbooks and the cost is only just
beginning.
Walter
do you accept that the CSIRO is correct in it’s assessment of the BFT population compared to it’s unfished population?
Jennifer,
“The tuna fishermen in South Australia catch smaller fish … (snip) … I don’t see anything wrong with this?”
Well catching smaller fish is at least a negative in terms of resource management, because if these fish were left in the wild they would probably continue to grow bigger naturally unless sick or predated upon etc, but more importantly they would continue to be part of the spawning stock biomass. But because they are taken away while young, it must have some kind of a negative impact on the productivity of the tuna stock in the wild, I believe.
Anyway, I don’t really have a problem with the method so long as the impact is assessed properly and ultimately everything (Aussie method plus long line method etc employed by others) is sustainable. I do wonder though if the stock as a whole wouldn’t be more productive if everyone stuck to catching only big fish (as well as staying within quotas, but it looks like the science needs some work here first as well, hopefully with better regulation better data will become available).
I don’t know what the truth is but at least I believe farmed tuna does not have such a tasty reputation as wild tuna here in Japan. This could be a bit of media manipulation by long line fishermen to keep the price of their product higher though.
David,
My understanding is that the farmed tuna is much, much tastier. My understanding is that the fisherman now gets paid so much per kilogram it is easier to stay within quota.
Can someone find the figures for the price of the marbled tuna from Port Lincoln versus the price for long-line caught tuna?
OK here is an introduction to issue:
“Tuna farming is almost a sacred ritual to the group of dedicated tuna quota owners in Port Lincoln. Over 97% of the Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna (SBT) quota of 5,265 tonnes now goes into tuna farms. That’s a total of 3,685 tonnes of SBT from the total quota going straight into pens in the ocean.
Between 1981 and 1990, the average price of Australian SBT in Japanese Yen per kilo was 684.4 yen/kilo. Between 1991 and 1999, when tuna farming had become a significant part of the Port Lincoln industry, the same tuna was now fetching an average of 1462 yen/kilo.
The benefits of farming have been numerous, not only to the owners but also to regional employment and the spin off industries such as tourism, transport and freight.
The total export value of the industry has grown from $45 million in 1994 to $252 million in 2001 — an increase of more than 56% in just eight short years. In 2001, the export value of the industry is expected to reach $300 million (depending on the exchange rate used by Customs to calculate export values). Not bad going for an industry that not so long ago was on the brink of near total disaster!
By now, most people know the story of the success of tuna farming in this regional South Australian town where a complete industry, almost on the verge of destruction, was completely turned around by the techniques of fish farming or sea culture. It’s an incredible story of personalities, events and history which perhaps will one day be told in full.
read more here: http://www.pubit.it/sunti/pes0106p.html
Should I start a new thread on the Port Lincoln tuna industry? Could someone, like Phil if your reading, write an introduction for us?
Interesting stuff Jennifer. I wonder though how much of the price increase has been due to supply reduction, as opposed to quality improvement. My un-educated guess is that it would be due to a bit of both, although difficult to quantify exactly I suppose.
hmmm, I mean of course total supply to the Japanese market, not just supply from Australia. This is a fishery that is supposed to have collapsed, and they say that the last tuna left in the sea will be the most expensive one.
Of interest, it was Pt Lincoln tuna fisherman Tony Santic who bought and raised Makybe Diva (won melbourne cup 3 times) and it was Pt Lincoln tuna fisherman Dean Lukin who went to the olympics (won gold) as a heavy weightlifter.
FYI a brief article on the world’s biggest fish wholesale market:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/travel/fishy-business-in-tokyo/2007/08/06/1186252600948.html
“Fresh tuna from India is said to be best, along with specimens caught off Australia and Mexico.”
Glad you enjoyed the seafood in Port Lincoln, Jennifer. The rest of Eyre Peninsula is has pretty good supplies too, but some species are soon to be somewhat restricted in availability.
Plans are afoot for another 19 Marine Parks along the South Austrlian Coastline, with 11 of them along Eyre Peninsula waters.
Helen Mahar
David@T
It could be that taking smaller fish is a simulation of natural predation and losses due to competition between the younger fish. Those young fish not taken therefore have a higher probability of survival to breeding age. Maybe the number of fish that reach breeding age is not affected by this approach.
The traditional idea of taking only the big ones may be reducing the population’s ability to produce new stock. Where’s Libby? Isn’t she a marine scientist or something like that?
Australia has the third largest territorial fisheries zone -yes that’s correct, but it ranks 55th in the world in terms of the fisheries resources it has at its disposal (CSIRO 1998) -care to comment on why that it is Walter, or Jen? I suspect not, but basically it has to do with a lack of upwellings and a lack of fluvial inputs…in other words we have a big area of sea but that sea is not particularly productive.
So please Walter, redo the table and compare those countries that are equivalent to Australia in terms of their actual fisheries resources and what proportion are utilised and what proportion are well managed? C’mon Walter let’s see what that shows us?
You imply that our fisheries are underfished, but our hundreds of fisheries biologists suggest that 17 of the major fisheries in this country are currently overfished? That’s about half of them.
Care to elaborate on exactly what is wrong with their models Walter or Jen? They happen to be using the same models fisheries scientists are using in the rest of the world, and seem to be able to get their papers published in the literature? So where have they all gone wrong? I regularly have interactions with fisheries biologists and I cannot detect any particularly green tinge.
Then there is the implication that the fisheries yields of the other countries in your table are sustainable? Some of those countries in that table are the source of the cheap poisonous fish products you consider we should be avoiding, because they have badly regulated fisheries and aquaculture.
Lastly there is the furphy that because we are underutilising our fisheries then we are forced to import to meet our local demand as our own products cannot meet supply.
A visit to the DFAT website will reveal that we currently harvest about 266,000 tonnes of seafood products per year (wild caught and aquaculture) that are worth a total of $2.2 billion.
Now some $1.65 billion of that value is exports -yes, that’s right, we don’t eat most of the value of what we catch in our own waters… we export it. Kind of puts a fairly big hole in the argument that a shortage of local fish puts Australians in the unenviable position of having to import cheap and nasty fish products.
I suggest that the reason that Australians import cheap and nasty fish products is because…. they’re cheaper than the local product and always will be as long as there is a lack of regulation in those fisheries…and, also the labour costs of catching fish in those economies remain much lower than ours.
I have no doubt some of the accusations you both make about the fisheries in the GBR region may have some weight, but that by no means allows you to extrapolate to every other fishery in Australia.
Despite claims to be a pair of skeptics you both seem remarkably adept at making up your mind on an issue and then cherry picking evidence and, in this case, misrepresenting the real situation. It is just as flawed an approach as that used by your rivals, those damn greens, and does you no credit.
The fact the Australian can publish the rubbish Walter is peddling on this issue without reservation is outrageous and underlines how low the standards have fallen at that once great newspaper.
And in reaction to the tuna fattening in SA.
While it has been good for the tuna fishing industry, it has environmental costs. Tuna are fed on blocks of frozen pilchards, waste is high. FCR for farmed salmonids is now down to 1:1.25 which means 1.25kg of food produces 1 kg of trout or salmon. With tuna the FCR is somewhere between 8-14kg of pilchards to produce 1 kg of tuna. What is not eaten falls to the bottom under the pens and constitutes a substantial nutrient input to the sheltered waters where the tuna are kept. A few years ago an unusual storm re-suspended this material and most of the penned tuna died. The government bailed out the tuna farmers, who, per capita, are probably the most able to pay their own insurance costs. And so one must ask why they were underinsured, or why it was that the insurance industry refused to pay their claims. Self induced reduction in water quality perhaps?
But this nothing that I have not said before on this site….and I begin to see why it’s always the same group of people here peddling the same set of beliefs over and over again.
Russell,
You raise some interesting issues.
What is the quantity and value of the fish we import?
Are you suggesting that the recent closure of the northern reef fishery, and many other fisheries around Australia, has not affected availability of the sorts of fish we are used to, and like eating?
Also, they have moved the tuna farms realizing that where they started farming – in the sheltered waters – was not sustainable environmentally. They are now the other side of the big island – what is it called?
Boxer,
“Maybe the number of fish that reach breeding age is not affected by this approach.”
Well I think it depends on the magnitude of exploitation.
On the one hand I suggest that taking small fish is equivalent to anthropogenically increasing the rate of natural mortality in that age/length class for the stock in the wild.
You suggest that by catching them we might actually be reducing natural mortality due to a side-effect of the exploitation…
I hope so, but if we think in the most extreme terms, say each year the entire cohort were taken for fattening (probably impossible but for illustrative purposes), eventually after a few years there would be no new cohorts joining the spawning stock biomass, and as natural mortality and human predation took it’s toll on the remaining older age classes that weren’t taken by the Australian operation, the species would go extinct.
Like I say, that is taking it to the extreme, but from this it’s clear that at some level of exploitation using this method there has to be a negative impact on the productivity of the stock in the wild. Of course the same is the case with methods that target matured fish as they too are producing offspring, so the sum of these different types of exploitation as a whole must be sustainable. I’m sure the CCSBT scientific committee (or whatever their group of scientists is known as) would have taken this into account in their modelling though… hmm…
Russell,
Trying to explain away our extraordinarily low harvest by attributing it to the low natural productivity of our waters only further confirms the mismanagement. This is blatantly untrue and claiming it can only be either incompetence, if actually believed, or deliberate dishonesty, if not. Primary productivity of oceanic waters is continuously monitored on a global basis by satellite measurement of chlorophyll concentration. It of course varies with time and place but average values have been calculated for every nation’s EEZ and are readily accessible online. ( http://www.seaaroundus.org/eez/eez.aspx ). The productivity of our waters is similar to or greater than that of many other countries which have far smaller fishery zones and much larger total harvests.
As for our high level of exports, that too just supports what I am saying. The only fisheries which can remain economically viable under our management costs and restrictions are the most lucrative ones and these are almost all ones in which there is an overseas market willing to pay very high prices for the product (e.g. SBT, abalone, live coral trout, crayfish). The reason for our high and growing level of imports is not exports but a highly restricted industry in terminal decline from regulatory impost.
A handful of allegedly overfished stocks and most of those highly questionable is simply a red herring to detract attention from the much larger number of stocks that are harvested at far below replacement level or not fished at all.
SJT asks if I accept that the CSIRO is correct in it’s assessment of the SBT population compared to it’s unfished population? The short answer is no. The catch per unit of effort and sighting of more schoals than seen in years would be impossible if the stock decline estimate was correct. When real world observation conflicts with theory the latter needs revision.
No amount of argument can refute the core fact that our harvest rate is the lowest in the world by orders of magnitude and management which says we can’t do better should be replaced by someone who can. The only good news in all this is that as the industry closes down we won’t need all this expensive management.
Russell,
P.S. I was pleased to see you say, “I have no doubt some of the accusations you both make about the fisheries in the GBR region may have some weight, but that by no means allows you to extrapolate to every other fishery in Australia.”
I only wish you could have said this when I first brought it up in public debate over the GBR but I guess it might have threatened GBRMPA support then just as CSIRO would be unhappy if you agreed on the wider problem now.
Russell: Welcome aboard the wandering trawler.
Russell correctly outlined the export of our best products in the catch.
For an inlander like me, skinned and boned flathead, a fish once common round the coast is retailing at about $33 / kg. Expensive hey compared to basa or nile perch that are often well under $10 in Woollies and Coles. But there are many other factors why we don’t eat local fish including the distribution chain and a refusal by the stores until recently to correctly label “imports” and the farmed fish with respect to the wild catch. Also “fresh” can simply mean not “frozen” and we can’t tell when or where it was caught. I find too the more crafty independent vendors’ fillet anything with opaque eyes.
With common fish like flathead there is a lot of water mixed up with even our inshore fisheries. It’s a big coastline sure, but anything that does not routinely school like pilchards and tuna takes time to harvest. No light plane pilots I knew ever remarked on their flathead sightings. What I suggest may have affected the flathead catch in particular is the banning of beach nets in many areas over time. My folks once had the knack of landing lots of inshore fish that way particularly in quiet spots. A big haul involved dozens of helpers on a good night.
Message Stick on our ABC tv yesterday gave us a glimpse of another form of netting that dogs our northern shores. Rogue reef nets that pile up on beaches turtles an all after cyclones are just the thin edge of a wedge between us and our neighbours fishing methods. Believe me these things pile up down south too along with busted up deck cargos most likely dumped at sea.
Policing this lot also takes time and I guess that’s truly reflected in our licensing structure these days.
Hi Folks and Gavin,
your comments on the shark fishery and indeed the Seafood Industry Victoria Website are misleading. Indeed Seafood industry Victoria is a government designed and appointed body that has played a lead roll in closing industry down and choking industries voice.. It failed the Victorian based shark fishery comprehensively and repeatedly in the late 1990’s in its battle against the introduction of ITQs and even tried to have shark fishermen removed from it organisation. Their website is green marine science propaganda and a shame job.
The fishery was based on school shark and longlining – but you failed to mention, just like the scientist you quote – that the wartime catch when school shark livers were used to replace Cod liver oil was enough to produce 500,000 gallons of oil for a single supplier (Roughly Australian Fisheries. From the same text you can see that it takes 20 school shark to produce a single gallon of oil. Loglines caught shark are bigger, but even at an average of 10-20 kilo per shark we were looking at a catch for just that supplier of 20,000 tpa plus – you do the math.. So if fisheries are only affected by fishing why close a fishery that had a capacity for 80 times the catch???
After the war in 1953 to be exact, artificial vitamin A was produced and the shark fishery in the USA collapsed immediately because there was no market for flesh as there is in Melbourne – the largest market of all with Victorians loving their flake. It is also the only market that these sharks that are common in al southern waters, can attract a price. Our fishermen still landed livers into the late 1950’s according to Roughly and first hand accounts. the past catches are unknown – just guessed by committees because there was just a box marked ‘shark’ when there was fish returns which was not until the 1980’s in some states. no problem, Deriso commented on the 1996 school shark stock assessment about catch per unit effort data that was ‘guessed by a committee and even then according to ‘rules’ that made that guess pessimistic.
The 1972 mercury ban was only applied to Victoria and immediately shark fisheries started in New Zealand and flourished in SA and Tas and they exported their ‘oversize’ fillets to Vic market.
Gillnets were used first to catch gummy shark by the Hobson and Mitchellson families in the 1960’s when a tuna seine net washed into shallow water and a heap of gummy shark – usually shy of smelly schoolie baits – were landed.
Gary Pinzone and others got welding in 1973 and built spools and worked out how to sling bottom set gillnets using a six inch mesh to avoid getting larger sharks. They struck a huge gummy shark resource that became the backbone of the fishery and saw off the competition with a more consistent product, less gristle and better price by up to a third.
In the mid 1980s they came from Canberra with CSIRO scientist and Olsen in tow. They quoted, quite wrongly that the Californian Fishery for this world wide abundant species had collapsed due to overfishing. it was the sudden loss of a market. They warned the same would happen here and set about restricting the number of licences to fish shark in commonwealth waters. The stock assessments used early were truly appalling – based on little more than the idea that sharks reproduce slowly – compared to what exactly? 60 fully developed and independent young per year per old she further protected by intense schooling behaviour and a huge range made this species ideal for a commercial fishery.They literally could breed almost as fast as rabbits They were selected in the first place in the late 1920’s because they could be caught year round and reliably in huge numbers. Called Tope in England poms living locally tipped off fishermen that if they gutted them quickly and skinned them they produced sweet boneless fillets.
They called these fillets flake and opened a fish and chip shop in Melbourne and were soon selling neck and neck with barracouta. Barracouta became less common in the mouth of the Yarra and other nearby places and with population increases and development and then became – for the first time – unreliable and lost their boats and market – but not the fish species. Thety are still common – but after the first tonne on the market they get no price, like salmon and anchovy. What couta you see now are just bycatch. you would have to start that fishery again from scratch.
The fishermen were inclined to agree with restricted entry. In those days there was only a general purpose fishing license and various fleets based on the east and west coast fished fairly discreet fishing grounds for sharks, crays and scallops with some boats also moving to danish seining and small boat trawling. Boats are like tractors and once a fisherman has the gear they can changeover from shark to scallop in a day. When I was fishing, in the early 1980s as a deckhand the usual price for gummies was $3.50 per kg – or about #100 per box. 100 boxes was a good catch for a trip of 4-7 days – 200 brilliant. Bass strait allowed 20 to 30 trips per year or 150 to 220 fishing days max for gillnetting sharks. the top catches were 50 to 60 tonne.
Sharks cannot be seen on a sounder – no swim bladder – they have to be hunted with nets. BC (Before Canberra) boats would typically carry 6-10 600m nets between 12 and 20 meshes deep. When they found fish they would lift half and split the fleet, shooting that half back. This meant that the nets were not in the water with dead fish in them too long and unlike all other commercial species sharks have to be gutted on landing – a very hard job to do quickly on a small bucking boat. There were never any bigger boats because any additional gain in a few extra days sea time was lost by the damage they did to gear and the cost of tying bigger boats to the wharf with a watch 24/7 electricals etc. indeed the most successful fishermen went to sea least for the most catch, the least costs in gear and fuel – but you had to be real good at finding sharks and few men or women were that good.
There were quite a few shots for nothing but boats worked together and eventually someone would find a school of gummy shark. Typically they are many kilometres wide and long. When they are feeding on hermit crabs or squid they hang around – but school shark are fast travellers in even bigger schools and shots were often miles apart to stay on the school as boats follow them before the tide runs or the weather cracks
Sharks are fished coming up to the moon, on and after the moon until the tides start racing then they go to the bottom and nets shot in those condition roll. pulling 6 k of net like rope onto the deck is no fun – and nether are the days on the wharf untangling it.
The boats are fifty footers (45-75ft) and most are round bilged like north sea boats that were built for defence during WW2 – but they all have their lineage. (Kerr Craft and Craftsmen of Australian Fishing). Fishermen commonly built their own boats. Sadly the last new boat launched was nearly twenty years ago
When sharks were found the boat works 24/7 – I have been awake for two days and a night – but it was for 150 boxes and a $10 a box on 10% I was more than happy – and it meant going home.
On one trip that I wanted to be my last I discovered why fishermen did not mind later capping the fleet. The weather was good around the moon and the shark were thick and it seemed that every man and his dog was fishing for shark.
We normally rarely saw another boat at sea fishing and met up in anchorages or back at the port – but it seemed everyone was having a go.
Limited numbers of buyers saw the price crash and my wages halved. The second trip saw the fleet back to its normal size and I got my catch and pay. Sadly the desire to limit the fleet had no affect on this problem until buyers did contract prices when the fleet was cut from 240 boats in the mid 1980s to 60 boats fishing in the early 1990’s.
As the Australian fleet shrunk the KIWI fleet, reduced to a rump by ITQs, grew almost boat for boat.
After an industry funded buyout of the top 40 boats in the fleet – forced on industry by a net cut to 6 nets – barely economic – that could only be increased by buying out another boat with a catch history.
No sooner was this almost over than economists and shark scientist together advocated closing the industry down for 12 year to let the stocks recover – and collapse the fishery and its markets. industry has just paid out 10 million for the bloody buyout – another example of unaccountable management lunacy.
That was averted when the fishermen hired one of the scientists themselves to revise the gummy shark stock assessment. He who pays the piper – and then they knew it was all bull. Gummy shark grow to be bull headed beasts and rarely get caught in 6 and 7 inch (allowed then) gillnets – but when they were reviewed their age was actually determined to be a similar max to school shark 64 years – or 50 years plus of ten to fifty pups each year. (Ref Gummy Shark 1994 AFMA)
Industry had to settle for a cut in the net length and ten nets went from 6000m to 4200m. For the six net boats that had not amalgamated this made life every hard and only a few persisted.
The management from Canberra became extreme and was unaccountable to anyone. The harder the fishermen fought the more committees were established. there was SHarkMAC, SharkFAG, SIRLC the supposed rep body SSIC, and the South East non trawl Fisheries Committee for non target species that were put on quotas in the late 1990s and so-on.
Meetings were in Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne, San Remo, even bloody Ceduna when they did not want to close a scrutiny of the stock assessment. Meetings went for three days often, end on end and scientist produced endless reports and stock modelling options for every species that hit the deck. I have 700kg of paperwork in the shed and I stopped collecting it in 2002. Sometimes they would even lose all the records of the 3 day meeting.
There were sixty boats fishing just about a scientist or bureaucrat per boat for management. levies had gone from $250 per year to $25,000. Never let a bureaucracy have full cost recovery in their legislation; – they just grow,
By capitalising the fleet with buyouts, higher fees and increasing the boat licence package price to near $600,000 the remaining boats had to work harder because the only way of paying for this was catching more fish. under quota the price of a boat and quota doubled and more. With a freeze on the transfer of licences fishermen who had been skippers for a licence holder actually had to buy the quota they caught for someone else.
In the mid 1990’s the first NZ tagged school shark turned up on the west coast – the first of now one hundred. the scientist were locked in. Old Olsen was convinced that only fishing affected catches and stocks and he had disciples aplenty. The fishing. Industry had the genetics reviewed and proved the sharks were the same and by 1999 both Kiwi and Aust scientists said at least 30 -100% of school shark stocks were shared.
All this was ignored as the entire emphasis shifted to school shark being endangered even – at one stage they were nominated under the bloody EPBC Act.
Then came the push for ITOs. Post 1996 the stock assessment concentrated on school shark. The industry was pretry small and met for anything up to 20 days per year, so when the first targets were announced – around 700t by memory, the sharing of nets and ports easily got the catch down to that target. Mysteriously the nect years target for schoolies was 500t. This worried the SA fishermen more because they virtually ionly fished school shark in their tideless waters to the west – but industry made it – anything to avoid the heavy regulation of quota. we discovered later that someone had simp0ly changed the ‘sample of boats’ each year, increasing the number og gummy shark boats and making school shark look ‘rarer’.
In 2000 the target catch was 320-350. industry met it but the figures were published until 6 months after quota. The quota was based on the historic catches between 1994 and 1997 so young fishermen got buggerall and fioshermen who had left the fishery got swags woth $0.5 to 1 million in some cases.
At the end of the first year the gummy shark catch was cut by 23% to ‘reduce the bycatch of school shark’ suddenly revealed by ‘new science’.
Industry award winning initiatives on nursery habitat restoration were ignored. The CSIRO concluded that when it resurveyed the places Olsen had caught pup schoolies and found none of few 50 years later that this ‘was due to overfishing’ – confirming their shift from science to religion. No mention of the industrialisation of the bays and inlets, the doubling of the Australian population that impacted where these pups formally schooled in and a host of other environmental changes. Seeing as the fishery was still good it was obvious to the lay person that school shark bred elsewhere in their southern range 0- but not to those who saw sharks as threatened and they were – by 2000, a world wide industry bigger than the fishery itself.
Fishermen are not qualified – but they are the reliable observers and they are highly intelligent intensely practical people forced through a dog eat dog management nightmare. Scientists and most AFMA bureaucrats will simply tell you they are all liars and cannot be trusted and will catch the last fish left alive – a mythology you could only believe if you had never seen how hard and dangerous fishing actually was.
The quota for school shark has been further reduced though there is not even a catch based stock assessment. I have been away to long – they probably use darts now. No-one can challenge them.
We still have a few shark boats but the skippers are mostly hitting fifty and should get out. The full bore fishing required to cover the costs of quota management – especially leasing and buying quota has taken all the older fishermen from the sea. the quota from boats sold has concentrated into a few hands. Other big operator even bought a Norwegian Longliner over and started fishing industrially. He caught that many seabirds he ended up with an observer full time. the fishery went back fifty years for a while – till he sold the boat. last heard that company was hunting for skippers and getting a few two word replies. Good hearted fishermen have created pools that they lease without profit to get young guys going. Deals are done to swap quota and retired fishermen will do the paperwork – but the gun young guys of 1999 are gone, one delivering yachts in the Caribbean, making other plans in families that fished for five generations. the loss of their skill is our loss. A loss to the Australian economy and society.
In 5 BC (when I fished) older fishermen would have paid for their boats and went to sea when it suited and gently introduced green deckhands to a hard industry. They hung in anchorages telling yarns and teaching informally. few deckhands did more than a trip and very few went on to get their sea time 3 years, and then their skippers ticket. even with a ticket there was no guarantee you could lease a boat and catch fish. it takes about 7 years to learn the trade.
What ever quota management was designed for, like single species fisheries, it is a complete stuff up for shark – but a stuff up meant a lot of money for science and bureaucracy. now fishermen are harassed in the pub, slandered on the media by scientists almost weekly for a while. They are the new ‘loggers’ of the 21st century, scorned by the great urban unwashed who eat their fish and chips on wooden tables.
School shark have been thick for a couple of years now. They are usually in deeper water but now they come in with the gummy shark and are unavoidable. Tonnes of perfectly good dead fish are being dumped from here on now the quota is all caught. it is illegal to dump fish – so no-one will publicly admit it. A convenient catch 22 for some.
There are always a few fishermen out there who have been well looked after by the bureaucracy. a trips overseas, a bit of media support for scientists, positions on committees for years paid for if they did not rock the boat. I have no problem with them at all – human nature and good luck to them – but they will never be the source of the truth. And the shark fisherman as a whole did OK personally. many ended up selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of quota, some even scoured a couple of million for licences they barely fished in the last buyout. good on them. Part payment for pain and suffering. it is the fish eating public that suffer with the price of flake tripling. it is the port towns with closed wharves, closed engineering works, no boat builders. Flinders island when it lost its regular commercial flights when there just were not enough boats fishing and sheltering there anymore.
Everyone is an expert on fisheries these days and it is the only primary industry that is run like it is a continual threat to conservation – forestry would be closed from day one under the same rules and mining would not get to dig their first hole.
As we saw with the Grey Nurse debacle marine science has simply adapted to become a dream of those who had great plans to restructure Australian Fisheries to be more economically ‘efficient. Wrong plan. Wrong fisheries, Wrong country, Wrong Market Wrong time.
Australian territory covers some of the richest fishing grounds in the world in the north and in the south. When in 1989 our exclusive economic zone became among the largest in the world we started closing our fisheries down. Time to started building fleets again based on simple area management and area rights that do not involve prior reporting before you go to sea and nominating a port when you come home – all at the flake eating public’s expense.
At the end of the day no-one really knows why there are good and bad years in any commercial fishery – but it is clearly in the fishermen’s best interest to look after the fishery because they have the most culturally, socially and economically invested in it.
Enjoy your tropical reef fish while you can.
A new study on reefs to our north by co authors Elizabeth Selig & John Bruno predicts a dire future for coral reefs.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11956/1066/
“This study is the first to conclusively connect warmer ocean temperatures to the spreading of white syndrome”
Bob McDonald: Thanks for a good account from your side of the shark biz
Bob said “Gavin, your comments on the shark fishery and indeed the Seafood Industry Victoria Website are misleading” also “no-one really knows why there are good and bad years in any commercial fishery”
I offered the Olson link for two reasons 1) Jennifer doesn’t like my romancing. 2) there is precious little fisheries R&D on the web from my era however I also offered the UTAS Bradshaw review, did you glance through it?
There is more to couta and shark than the Vic view from but I can’t recall the details of catches and boxes I saw landed on the far side. Folks should realize though most of the Bass Strait fishery is under Tasmanian Government regulation and there has been considerable rivalry and a little poaching going way back.
I bet none of this is on the web: Ray Dart used to win the Stanley to Inglis regatta “open” sea race often with his converted sloop under sail with the motor flat out. Ray used to sort of run the 1950’s co opp freezer that had a direct line to Vic fish supplies. One of his deck hands was badly bitten on the leg by their “fresh” deck cargo. About then we had one of Australia’s first dive shops and it developed regular training programs based at East Wynyard. Some of their graduates did a lot of work on the fisheries.
“Coastal Fisheries of Tasmania and Bass Strait” Tasmanian Underwater Photographic Society – (Cat and Fiddle Press 1982. NB see rare books ) with 142 identifications of shallow water fish says this in the intro-
“Since the early days of Settlement in Tasmania fishes have been the subject of more general interest than most other animal groups found in this region. Therefore it is somewhat surprising that is only in recent years that many of the 290 species which inhabit the shallower waters around our coastline have been recorded and scientifically described”
“The Facts” See George Bass and others – CSIRO Marine Research
http://www.marine.csiro.au/LeafletsFolder/12tas/12.html
Back to our commercial fishermen: Interviewing boat owners an operators during the 1980’s could reveal a tangle of fishy problems like rubbish dumping, seal shooting, cray baiting with illegal and unwanted catch also some theft on the wharf etc. but I say impacts on locals more often reflect their distance from major markets. That’s about middlemen not NGO’s. Home port charges are another issue.
When I met say the Hurseys from Stanley and compared notes with big “foreign” vessels with Eden or St Helens registrations off loading catch from the West Coast via our Duck River outlets it’s easy to see how the whole thing got tied up during buyouts. Don’t recall any from Grassy though; they have their own miles of shallow kelp covered reefs. Sure Bob, Licenses worth millions don’t help the fish and chip trade much but we need to put that in another context. Waterfront property on Sydney Harbor has a price tag most of us can’t afford.
All Tasmanian estuaries I fished eventually lost their annual sometimes frenzied “runs” of scale fish coming in after schools of tiddlers. Spectacular reefs behind the dive school are empty of giant crays and abs now. Ray once filled his sea well off Table Cape in an hour or two with crayfish each too big for my cycle pack. The most popular spear fishing reefs off Rocky Cape are now protected. We move on hey.
http://www.aussieweb.com.au/directory/directory.aspx?cid=2076&lid=31424
http://www.tasmanianseafoods.com.au/smithton.html
Allen Hansen was a great source of info in sourcing and processing at the export industry top end.
When gummy shark was a last resort we had no idea Mekong catfish would become such a regular delight.
Walter
would you rather rely on anectdotal or scientific evidence?
Doesn’t CPUE etc get taken into consideration when doing the assessment anyway?
Gavin,
slandering fishermen reveals your own shortcomings – it might be an illness from the fish you chose to eat.
David – see ray Beveton’s Swansong at http://www.benyami.org/
Bob: Having spent a bit of time round the coast and islands I can say fishing has been a rough biz like forestry and mining, hence the stream of new regulations for better or worse.
Until recently the strait had only a few island reserves but with the declaration of the Boags Marine Reserve near the Hunter Group and the Beagle Reserve towards the Prom in June 2007 we have come a long way from the days of uncontrolled whalers and sealers etc.
http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/mpa/southeast/boags/index.html
http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/mpa/southeast/beagle/index.html
This program goes back to the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Another takeover hey
There is a similar review at state level for coastal, estuarine and marine sustainability.
soer.justice.tas.gov.au/2003/cem/7/index.php
Folks fishing further north should take notice.
This larger lot on the web from Minister Turnbull about fresh bans on certain types of fishing etc. completely escaped my notice – sorry
See the map here. It shows the extent of this new system for securing our fishing future.
http://www.environment.gov.au/coasts/mpa/southeast/index.html
See also a Media release – “World’s first temperate network of marine reserves declared 5th July 2007” pdf, also this comment-
“Australia’s South-east Commonwealth Marine Reserve Network is the first temperate deep sea network of marine reserves in the world. This large network covering 226,458 square kilometres, covers representative examples of the diverse seafloor features and associated habitats found in the South-east Marine Region. The South-east Marine Region stretches from the far south coast of New South Wales, around Tasmania and Victoria and west to Kangaroo Island off South Australia.
The reserves include striking features such as underwater canyons and mountains, and the diverse marine life associated with them, some of which is new to science and found nowhere else in the world”
I have been trying to sell finished seafood products like conger eel, king crab, mackerel to Australian seafood importers. But in vain. What seafood do you eat?
For seafood, we have king crab(half shelled and all shelled),snow crab, sweet shrimp, redfish, catfish, greenland halibut, mackerel, sardines,sharks, anglerfish, yellow fin, silver fish, trout salmon, chum salmon, conger eel, yellow croaker, baby octopus, squid, cod, hake, hoki, herring, roe,etc.
As to finished products style, we have 8 series: sushi products, roasted, boiled, seasoned, steamed, fillets and portions, smoked.
For vegetables, we have EDAMAME, spinach,asparagus,broccoli,cauliflower,green beans,burdock,okra,mushroom,taro,carrot, courgette, red peppers, onion, shallot,potato,kampyo,etc.
Don’t Australian people eat these things?