Fisheries minister looks to save industry, ‘not just sponges’

Shane Jones will revisit local and international steps to protect vulnerable marine habitats from trawling, saying we risk losing the fishing industry entirely and all the jobs it creates.

A new Horizon Research survey, commissioned by Greenpeace, finds 73 percent of New Zealanders want the Government to prioritise a ban on bottom trawling in South Pacific international waters.

But the new fisheries minister isn’t convinced, and has commissioned a “deep dive” into the issues around trawling seamounts – the international environmental concerns, versus New Zealand’s economic development interests. “Not just the narrative, ‘industry bad, extinguish; sponges good, save’.”

It comes after Newsroom revealed Jones met fishing industry leaders this week, including past and present campaign donors.

They put their cases on cameras on boats, catch limits, bottom trawling and immigration waivers to the minister at an exclusive wine and oysters function in Nelson.

(The Horizon survey also finds 57 percent of New Zealanders say that an MP who has accepted donations from the fishing industry should not be Minister of Oceans and Fisheries).

Seafood NZ chair Greg Gent and chief executive Dr Jeremy Helson have written to the minister with a list of requests, including more complete consultation on the proposed options for trawl corridors in the Hauraki Gulf and how they fit with other proposed protection measures.

They also ask that he recognise that New Zealand already has 30 percent of its ocean space protected to internationally accepted standards.

“Total seafood exports reached $2.0 billion in the year to July 2023,” they write. “With the right support, we believe we can grow this number, create more jobs, and be frontline partners in further reducing our impacts on the environment.”

Jones will sit down with them again on Monday, at the Ministry for Primary Industries in Wellington.

He says: “We’ve protected seamounts in New Zealand. We’ve protected seamounts up in the Kermadecs. And I want to make sure there’s a mature balanced discussion, not loud voices trying to guilt trip politicians.”

There are three questions about bottom-trawling:

• In the Hauraki Gulf, just last year, the previous Government announced a ban on bottom trawling and Danish seining from up to 89 per cent of the 1.2-million-hectare marine park. “Officials will help me better understand the Hauraki Gulf decisions,” Jones says. “Obviously I will need to examine the options. I don’t want science and economics to fall victim to agendas that ignore working families, jobs and export revenue.”
• Elsewhere in the waters of New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone, deep sea fishing companies trawl seamounts but within tight rules, and with fisheries observers on board to ensure they’re not pulling up coral, sponges and other vulnerable species.
• In the high seas of the South Pacific Ocean, New Zealand is the only country still trawling seamounts, and at Jones’ direction has defended its right to continue to do at South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) negotiations in Ecuador this month. “We are taking stock in relation to the South Pacific,” says Jones. “It’s a matter which deserves economic consideration as well as other inputs.”

Jones warns the regulation of New Zealand’s deep sea fishing companies poses an existential threat to the industry. “I fear that if the fishing industry doesn’t have a consistent champion, then … we are witnessing the complete drift towards outlawing New Zealand’s participation in international fisheries.

“If regulations continually disincentivise people to invest and go fishing internationally, then are we surprised that they say, we’re going to down tools because there’s no way we can make a buck? It could be that’s what happens.

“The New Zealand fleets can’t compete with the subsidised Asian fleets in the Pacific. The Americans pay $68 million into the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, as you know, that gets handed out to the Pacific island nations. So it could be that the sun is setting on New Zealand fishing interests catching orange roughy and other species, and we surrender it to fleets out of Asia.

“But before we do that, we’re going to have a very deep dive into what the situation is confronting us as Kiwis up in the Pacific.”

Jones acknowledges those Asian fleets aren’t trawling seamounts. “No, but they do a great deal of fishing of the pelagic species, and New Zealand has been dislocated from that fishery for a host of reasons.

In response, he says, New Zealand should investigate the future of its own fisheries in the South Pacific and Southern Ocean, including bottom trawling.

Newsroom put it to him that there had already been scientific “deep dives”; that there is a wealth of evidence about the harm caused by trawling seamounts, impacting on spawning orange roughy and other species, and dragging up benthic organisms like corals and sponges.

“In all seriousness, you could be right,” he says. “But we’re gonna take the next 12 months to do a deep dive on this to make sure the position that we have going forward reflects both the development priorities, if any, of the country, and the international concerns about sea mounts.

“The guts of the matter is, if we are going to continually shut down wild fisheries, which is increasingly looking like a reality, then where’s the protein going to come from? And that only forces the case, in my view, for giving people certainty that they can grow fish and farm the ocean.

“We are a new Government, we are allergic to the red tape left behind by the last government. There has been too much adversarialism. We’re taking a commonsense approach. No precipitous moves that ignore the interests of working families.”

The fishing industry is welcoming Jones’ engagement.

Dr Jeremy Helson, the chief executive of industry association Seafood NZ, confirmed fishing companies would like to be able to trawl more of Hauraki Gulf than the Labour Government permitted.

“We believe that there are ways that we could achieve the same biodiversity objectives, but with less of an impact on the seafood industry.”

Further out to sea, he says 99.9 percent of the South Pacific is closed to New Zealand boats. “We’re talking the extent to which we should fish on one-tenth of one percent of the South Pacific, which is an enormous patch of water, obviously. So context is important.”

The industry wants the opportunity to use the resources of the South Pacific, he says, and is of the view that the protection measures are “vastly more significant” than people understand.

He defended trawling around seamounts. “Seamounts are often where fish congregate. And it’s not like we deliberately trawl over the surface of the seamount. We’re fishing aggregations that accumulate above those features. Occasionally, unfortunately, yes, we do catch benthic organisms. We try not to.”

We acknowledges trawl nets will disturb the surface of the seamount, and the benthic organisms on it. There’s no way round that fact.

“No, there’s not. If you are we’re going to touch the seabed with some fishing gear, you are going to disturb what is there.”

Is that a problem? “It requires very careful management.”

Sealord boss Doug Paulin says New Zealand’s wild-caught fish remain “the best protein meat in the world environmentally”, including those caught by bottom-trawling. Their emissions are lower than land-based red meat.

“We say, the government should be very proud of the position that we have in regards to the wild-catch fish that we catch. And we should be educating the New Zealand public in regards to help good while-catch fishers environmentally, including bottom contact fishing.”

But Greenpeace ocean campaigner Ellie Hooper says their polling shows a “clear lack of trust” in Jones as Minister of Oceans and Fisheries.

“The vast majority of people – from New Zealand First and National voters, to Green Party voters – want bottom trawling banned in the South Pacific, and transparency around the commercial fishing industry via a comprehensive cameras programme.

“This flies in the face of what Minister Jones is currently prioritising, wining and dining with fishing industry bosses, and promising to be an ‘advocate’ for them at the expense of the oceans.”

Barry Weeber, the co-chair of Environment and Conservations Organisations NZ, says the fishing industry’s claims to be sustainable simply don’t hold water.

“That’s just ignoring the impacts on the ecosystem and the environment and the potential for extinctions of benthic species. And that’s not helpful to the industry’s long term sustainability, and the public view of the industry,” he says.

“I think the cameras have forced the industry to be better in their reporting – because they’re certainly reporting more than they previously had, for corals and sponges and other things, both in the inshore and in the deep water.”