Fisheries managementBy Sam Mossman

Eighteenth-century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke famously once said that “those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it”.

Government efforts to further restrict recreational snapper catches in the North Cape to East Cape zone (SNA1) need to

be viewed against the history of the snapper fishery to get an overall viewpoint of the rights, wrongs and fairness of this action.

The abridged versionAs New Zealand recovered from the Great

Depression of the 1930s, rigorous controls were placed on most industries. Commercial fishing was in stagnation for many years; it was virtually impossible to build a new boat and get a fishing license. Twenty-four years passed before a special Industrial Development Conference provided a call to enlarge the trawling industry, and in 1962 a parliamentary select committee investigated how to do this. Its report, known as the Scott Report, recommended freeing up access and providing tax incentives to encourage fish exports, but nothing much was said about recreational fishing or conservation.

The brakes come offSuddenly in 1963 the industry was opened up

to all comers. In 1964, 136 new vessels began fishing; 209 more joined them in 1965. By 1967 investment in the New Zealand fishing fleet had almost doubled. Many new boats had electronic equipment that made fishing safer and easier. This, combined with the exclusion of the Japanese distant-water snapper fleet from New Zealand waters around this time, saw the export market for snapper burgeoning.

Wherever snapper occurred they were the number-one target species, and no other coastal fish was so rapidly and greatly depleted. In the early 1970s the advent of pair trawling (two boats towing one extra-large net between them) made it easy to sweep up all the fish over large areas of seabed. Although there were numerous regulations and restrictions, they were poorly enforced and ineffective. It was a case of too few controls, too late.

Between 1964 and 1971 the total New Zealand fish catch increased by a half, the volume of exports nearly doubled, and the value increased fourfold. In 1971 snapper made up a third of the total wet-fish catch and the government was doing all it could to encourage this. There was a range of export incentives, including loans and tax breaks for buying vessels and building

Snapper– the history

The excesses of commercial trawling for

spawning snapper in the summer of

1977-’78 overwhelmed the on-shore

processing facilities at times and truck-

loads of snapper were buried at the Nelson

tip, a tragic waste of breeding fish.

Photo: Nelson Provincial Museum,

G.C. Wood collection 4225 FR23

12 New Zealand Fishing News September 2013

The Thelma G works her nets amongst the recreational fleet off Napier in January 2008.

factories, along with chillers, freezers and ice-making plants. Building boats in New Zealand was expensive, so special import licenses were issued to bring in fishing vessels from overseas. There were even subsidised fishing-vessel ownership savings accounts to help encourage young skippers to get their first boat.

Snapper collapseBy the late 1960s the word ‘over-fishing’ was

beginning to be heard among recreational and commercial fishermen alike. There can be no doubt that snapper were becoming fewer and on average smaller, yet the official position at the 1968 National Development Conference was still that catch rates were continuing to improve and there was ‘no evidence of serious over-exploitation’. Ten years later, however, when the snapper catch reached an all-time high of 18,000 tonnes, there could be no doubt of it. This figure is not far short of twice the yield the Ministry of Primary Industries today considers acceptable.

Throughout the 1970s the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries had been under increasing pressure to acknowledge the overfishing problem and do something about it. Although the bureaucrats were hamstrung by weak legislation, they could have done more had there been the political will. Part of the problem was that the first Minister of Fisheries, Duncan Macintyre, appointed in 1976, held the marginal Bay of Plenty seat, an electorate where fishing was simply too much of a nettle to grasp. His ‘Think Big’ fishing policy had the unintended effect of increasing pressure on an already stressed snapper fishery.

The commercial destruction of the snapper fisheries was almost completed in 1978-‘79 when the last of the spawning schools of snapper were cynically cleaned out by large new trawlers working close inshore. So many spawning snapper were killed that shore processing facilities in some areas were overwhelmed and many truckloads of snapper were taken to local landfills for burying. Travesties like this saw the snapper catch collapse in many areas.

The quota systemMAF experimented with new tighter

management options, including ‘controlled’ fisheries and an unwieldy bureaucratic process called ‘fishery management planning’, but these were supplanted in 1983 by the decision to implement the quota system for inshore fish, as had already been done with deep-sea fisheries. Snapper were among the first inshore fish allocated in 1986. A total allowable catch of 6546 tonnes was set and divided up among commercial fishermen according to their catch

history over the previous three years. This established property rights: each tonne

of snapper quota conferred on its owner the right to catch a tonne of snapper every year in perpetuity. Effectively the fishery became owned by the people who owned the boats and caught the fish. However, quota could be leased, sold, or bought, and the big fishing companies set out to buy up as much quota as they could get to ensure security of access to fish in the future.

When first handed out, snapper quota was widely spread among 752 quota holders, but values rose rapidly. Many fishermen simply could not resist the offer of a large cheque, and by 1996 there were only 341 holders of snapper quota, with 63% of the quota owned by just six big companies.

Aggregation of fish quota by corporate owners in the late 1980s set in motion a trend away from small owner-operated vessels to company-owned vessels which paid the crew a percentage of the catch value. For the most part the small-scale commercial fishermen surrendered their power to own and control the fishery.

Quota underminedUnfortunately the snapper quota, initially set

at levels which would allow the badly-depleted fishery to rebuild, was undermined by two things: the Quota Appeals Authority and the ‘deemed value’ scheme.

The Quota Appeals Authority was set up to hear commercial fishermen’s individual grievances over the amount of quota they had been awarded. According to some who were there at the time, it became a bit of a scandal, with fishermen pleading poverty, being granted extra quota so they could make a living, then

immediately selling it for cash. In addition to the original 6546 tonnes of snapper quota allocated, the QAA dished out a further 1679 tonnes – a 25% increase, and the formal Total Allowable Catch was adjusted upwards to allow for this.

The ‘deemed value’ system was brought in to encourage commercial boats to land fish that they caught accidentally (or ‘accidentally-on-purpose’) but did not hold quota for, so these fish were included in catch reporting and not just discarded at sea. Depending on your point of view, deemed value can be like a well-deserved penalty for catching fish that should have been avoided, or it can be an unfair penalty for accidentally catching certain kinds of fish that could not be avoided while legitimately trying to catch other fish.

There is another complication: sometimes the deemed value is low and the fish price is high, meaning there is a profit to be made by ‘accidentally’ catching fish for which no quota is held. This happened with snapper, resulting in even more fish being taken over and above the level originally set to allow a rebuilding of the fishery and the ‘extra’ doled out by the QAA.

Despite the rebuild of stocks being partly nobbled by: the extra QAA handouts; the commercial deemed value scheme (last year this accounted for a further 3% over the top of the commercial quota); and the extra fishing mortality partly caused by trawling, Danish seining, split nets, dumping of catches at sea, and illegal fishing (allowed for as a further 10% for commercial quota), there has still, remarkably, been a slow stock regeneration in SNA 1, to the extent it has reached its minimum acceptable level of 20% of what is estimated to be the original un-fished stock level.

New Zealand Fishing News September 2013 13

Lawyers at dawnOver the years, attempts to reduce

commercial catch in shared inshore fisheries through the quota system have often been aggressively resisted by commercial interests. An example is the 1996 case between Sanfords and the Ministry of Fisheries. In 1995, the ministry attempted to reduce the amount of snapper taken in SNA1 to help the fishery recover. Recreational fishermen’s daily limits were reduced substantially from 20 snapper per person per day down to nine.

Recreational anglers both accepted and welcomed the cuts for the sake of the future of the fishery. But the commercial operators refused to do their share, and rather than accept any cuts to their quota, took the matter to court. Initially the ministry won the right to manage the fishery, but the decision was overturned on appeal for what was considered by many to be a technicality, and despite the recreational bag limit being halved, a commercial reduction was not imposed.

This case considerably soured relationships with recreational fishers, who were from then on reluctant to take any further cuts or trust the fishing companies to do their share in rebuilding the fishery that the industry had largely destroyed in the first place.

In 2006, in response to Ministry of Fisheries’

efforts to cap the catches of recreational anglers (which would result in continuing reductions of individual catch limits as angler numbers increased) in the ‘Soundings’ proposal, recreational anglers were forced to go to the High Court to establish their rights in law. Known as the ‘Kahawai Legal Challenge’, the case, although based on the setting of kahawai quota levels, was really about establishing a legal precedent that applied to all shared fisheries, including snapper. It was led by on-line public fishing rights group option4, the NZ Big Game Fishing Council (now the New Zealand Sport Fishing Council), the Recreational Fishing Council and Te Runanga A Iwi O Ngapuhi.

Although the case was between recreational anglers and the Minister of Fisheries, the commercial fishing industry could see that case law in favour of recreational anglers might potentially affect their profits, and were quick to stick their oar in.

In a landmark decision, recreational fishing was recognised as a right that stems from common law; allowing for people’s wellbeing (health or physical welfare) is the starting point when setting the Total Allowable Commercial Catch; people provide for their wellbeing by catching and purchasing fish; and both customary Maori and recreational fishing

interests must be provided for where they exist. The same does not apply for commercial interests.

This, for the first time, established the recreational fishing right in law, and placed it ahead of commercial fishing. The Minister of Fisheries and the ministry accepted the decision but, predictably, the commercial industry appealed. Despite some aspects of the original decision being subsequently watered down, some important principles were established in law.

Here we go again…So, recreational (and customary) must be

allowed for before commercial limits are set. But determining what the recreational catch actually is has proven difficult. A number of ‘surveys’ in the past have been rejected by the minister as wildly inaccurate, and an allocation of 2600 tonnes (recreational and customary) in 1997 was pretty much guesswork. And it has never been adjusted since to allow for increases in population or an increase in the popularity of recreational fishing.

The Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI, the successor of MAF and MOF) claims to have more robust figures from more recent survey efforts over the last few summers, concluding that the recreational SNA 1 take is around the 3,700-tonne mark – 1,100 tonnes over what has been allocated.

This leads us to the current proposals to even further reduce recreational catch limits by cutting the number of fish allowed from nine down to three or four, in addition to increasing the size limit from 27cm to around 35cm (the commercial size limit has never budged from the original 25cm). Putting aside for the moment the question how a one-third reduction of recreational catch requires a two-thirds cut in catch limits, and given the commercial industry’s inclination to reach for its lawyers first, I guess that the recreational sector is seen as the easy option to wring another thousand tonnes of quota from.

So, despite commercial interests being largely responsible for destroying the snapper fishery in the first place (with government encouragement); despite it being handed a massively valuable gift in the way of private rights to what had been a public resource (at no charge); despite derailing the rebuilding of stocks through the Quota Appeals Authority and Deemed Value scheme; despite illegal fishing, dumping at sea, other fishing mortality and wastage from split nets; and despite commercial never having accepted any meaningful cuts in ‘their’ quota (see sidebar) while the public share has been crushed from 30 down to nine snapper, they want us to bend over once again, while they remain untouched.

SNA1 Recreational bag limits – the historyIn January 1985 the first daily snapper bag limit for amateur fishers was set at 30 per person and

minimum legal size (MLS) at 25cm.

In September 30, 1993, this was reduced to 20 snapper per person.

On October 30, 1995, this was further cut to nine snapper per person in SNA1 and the size limit was raised to 27cm for amateur fishers only. These regulations have continued until the present day.

amateur catch bag reductions to date are 66%.

if further reduced to three snapper as proposed, the amateur reduction since 1985 would be 90%.

Total Allowable Commercial Catch at comparative periods1986-87 4710 tonnes1993-94 4928 tonnes (increase)1995-96 4938 tonnes (increase)1997-2008 4500 tonnes.

Overall, commercial reduction since taCC introduced is only 4.5%.

Skeggs huge pair trawlers, the Hawea and the Wanaka

were part of the massive overfishing which saw spawning

snapper nearly wiped out in Tasman by the early 1980s.

Photo: Nelson Provincial Museum, the Nelson Mail

Collection (fishing, trawlers)

14 New Zealand Fishing News September 2013

The final analysisRecreational fishers have taken the cuts

over the years and we are told there has been a modest, but slowing recovery of snapper to 20% of un-fished stocks. The proposals currently before the minister would effectively see all these gains transferred to commercial companies for their private profit, while the fishing public is reduced to a level where it is hardly worth going fishing.

Well, I say NO WAY! The public have only ever caught what they need to feed their families, and if the fisheries wonks got this number wrong, it is not our fault. In fact, there is a pretty good economic and moral case to make snapper a recreational-only fishery, but we don’t have space for that discussion here. Certainly further recreational reductions are against fairness and natural justice. This is not good enough by a long way (and, if you ask me, a crazy move politically, coming up to an election).

Then there is also the morally very dubious situation of leading lights in the National Party being major shareholders in our largest commercial fishing company. Read into this what you like.

Although it is fair to say that further recovery of SNA 1 is very desirable for everyone, recreational bag limits are already as low as is reasonable. In the final analysis, commercial overfishing broke the snapper fishery, so they should stand up and (finally) bear some of the pain of fixing it.

Cause-effect changes in commercial catch rate of snapper in the SNA1 region over time,

reflecting national trends. Catch data from pages 722-758 of the Fisheries Assessment

Plenary, May 2006: stock assessments and yield estimates. Compiled by the Ministry of

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