Fish forever

“I was four-years-old when Dad first took me out on the Manukau Harbour. It became a ritual. Mum’d wake me. Weetbix. Down to the beach. It’d still be dark, so I’d hold the dinghy in the shallows while Dad parked the Cortina.”

Like all good fishermen, Andrew Penny, a 39-year-old father of four now living in Kerikeri, tells a good story. The woolly hat. Marmite sandwiches. Milo. Thawing fingers.

“We only had an old Seagull outboard so it took ages to reach our spot. But then we’d reel them in – snapper, trevally, kahawai. Well, almost always: sometimes there’d be long waits – ‘periods of companionable silence’ I think you call it.”

Father and son. Bonding. Yarning. Catching a feed. It’s a timeless picture – as quintessentially Kiwi as, well, fish ‘n’ chips. But there are signs our fondness for fish – we eat 25kg each a year – may be unsustainable.

In 2009, Gareth Morgan and Geoff Simmons’ book Hook, Line and Blinkers argued for tighter controls on recreational fishing. In June this year the government hinted the bag limit for snapper – presently nine a day – will be cut in ‘Snapper 1’, the fishing zone that takes in the Hauraki Gulf; in some parts of this zone, populations are just six per cent of their original levels. Little wonder snapper are coded deep red on Forest & Bird’s Best Fish Guide which grades fish from green/good down to red/bad.

Only it’s not just snapper. The Best Fish Guide recommends we avoid scampi, scallops, hoki and squid – indeed, many of the fish you’ll find at the supermarket.

Where have the fish gone?

Worldwide, fish stocks are in a serious state. The global populations of large top-of-the-food-chain deep-sea species such as bluefin tuna, cod and swordfish are at just 10 per cent of their already-depleted 1950s levels. And in one celebrated example, Newfoundland’s northern cod fishery – the world’s largest – numbers abruptly crashed in 1992 to one per cent of pre-exploitation levels. The fishery was closed– 35,000 jobs went – and the fish have never come back.

The 2009 documentary The End of the Line outlined the apocalyptic toll modern fishing fleets – with their radar, sonar, on-board refrigeration, GPS and spotter planes – are taking. The impact of modern fleets is estimated to be 14,000 times that of traditional fishers. “We are fighting a war against fish,” said eminent marine biologist Daniel Pauly. “And we are winning.”

So what’s the worst case scenario? A 2006 study, published in the journal Science, forecast that by 2048 all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed” (that is, they’d be less than 10 per cent of their original size).

New Zealand’s solution

Luckily, New Zealand’s isolation – and sparse population – mean we’ve avoided the intensive hoovering that has cleaned out seas like the Mediterranean. Still, by the 1970s, many of our major fisheries were stressed. To protect them a Quota Management System (QMS) was introduced in 1986, putting New Zealand at the forefront of fisheries management internationally.

This is how it works. The right to catch fish – forever – is divided into 100 million shares, aka the quota. Each share gives the holder the right to one hundred millionth of the total allowable commercial catch, or TACC, of a certain fish in a certain area. The government determines the TACC each year.

Quota is freely tradeable: any New Zealander can buy shares. Then you can use your quota yourself, or rent it to someone else. It’s a simple concept – and here’s the genius of it (in theory, at least). Not only does the QMS set limits on how much fish can be caught, it gives an incentive to fish sustainably. That’s because the more fish there are, the larger and more valuable each share in that stock becomes. And that value is substantial: total quota is now priced at over $4 billion.

“The QMS… created possibly the most efficient fishing industry in the world,” wrote Morgan & Simmons. It’s profitable and unsubsidised. Factor in Treaty settlements – Maori now control half of our fisheries – and the picture can look like one of partnership and sound management.

Look more closely, though, and there are issues.

Can we trust the system?

If you have faith in the QMS, then basically any fish you can buy in New Zealand is sustainable by definition. However, there are several reasons to doubt the system.

The first is that Quota is calculated on Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), an opaque concept critics say isn’t sustainable at all.

Dr Neill Herbert, from the University of Auckland’s Leigh Laboratory, explains: “The objective of a fishery whenever it starts up – and this is going to sound crazy when I say it – is to fish it hard, down to around 25 per cent of virgin biomass. Now that sounds like overharvesting – it sounds like rape and pillage – but there’s actually a good biological basis to it.”

A lot of the biomass in a fishery is not ‘productive’ – the old fish who aren’t growing or breeding. So you fish down so you’re left with a predominance of the fast-growing teenagers – the ones who are very productive (and growing even faster because of less competition for food). You cut out the dead wood. For most fisheries, you can fish down to 25 per cent and the rebound potential is such that it’s sustainable. That’s the theory anyway. But MSY is based on some major assumptions.

The first is obvious: how the hell do you count fish accurately? “Counting fish is just as easy as counting trees,” said British scientist John Shepherd, “except they are invisible and they move.”

For our fisheries, the government charters a boat that trawls a sampled area. But the sample is only ever a fraction of the fish’s range. To estimate the total population requires some educated guesswork.

Moreover, the cost of each survey – up to $2 million a pop – ensures only a few of our stocks are surveyed. As Forest & Bird’s Katrina Subedar, a critic of the current system, puts it: “We rely on estimates and models to guess stock levels. Then we give out quotas based on these estimates.”

Then there’s the individual biology of each fish species. Some breed fast and die young, others don’t. Get this wrong, as we did with orange roughy, and you stuff a fishery.

How does fishing affect the rest of the environment?

Our fisheries rely heavily on trawling. It’s a pretty antiquated technique: you can compare it to clear-felling a forest in order to catch the animals within it.

As York University’s Professor Callum Roberts puts it: “Nets are dragged across the seabed and as they are pulled they cut down the animals that live on the surface – things like corals, sea fans and sponges. The signs of destruction brought up on deck by the trawl would make an angel weep.”

Then there are the hundreds of seals, sea lions, giant basking sharks and seabirds killed by commercial fishers in our waters each year. And dolphins. There are just 55 Maui dolphins left: 100 Per Cent Pure New Zealand could be just the second country (after China) to drive a dolphin to extinction. However, fishing industry people will tell you they’re not to blame. How many Maui dolphins, they say, have they caught?

The official numbers back them up. But then who’s going to own up to catching a Maui dolphin if the price of your honesty is a closed fishery?

Certainly you hear mutterings that our by-catch numbers have been systematically under-reported. “You wouldn’t believe what we’d dredge up,” one fisherman who worked the orange roughy and hoki fisheries in the 1980s and ‘90s told Green Ideas: “We’d get seals all the time and they’d be half dead or half alive and we’d just gaff ’em and chuck ’em back over. We didn’t report any of it. The Ministry don’t have a clue.”

So if you want to be more environmentally sensitive when you buy fish, then Forest and Bird’s Best Fish Guide is a good starting point. It’s based not just on how many fish there are, but the impacts of the fishery on other non-target species (by-catch), and also the fishing methods used.

How does our country rate?

Globally, New Zealand is one of the more responsible fishing nations. For a start, we have a fisheries management system, something 93 per cent of coastal nations lack. A recent World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report ranked us eighth in the world (in terms of our compliance with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation fishing code).

However, our bottom trawling and by-catch stats saw us marked down. So, too, our low number of marine reserves. And there are several fish stocks that are overfished. A few, like the North Island’s West Coast snapper, have technically collapsed.

“Commercially caught snapper is one of our worst ranked fish choices,” says Forest & Bird’s Katrina Subedar. “There is serious concern regarding the sustainability of the level at which snapper is commercially fished in New Zealand.”

“We encourage consumers to make more sustainable seafood choices by eating alternative fish like kingfish, trevally and tarakihi.” It’s a message that’s starting to get through. “We used to use trevally for bait and give kahawai to the cat,” Kerekeri’s Andrew Penny recalls. “But both of these fish are great smoked and also make excellent raw fish – something I never used to do. We are definitely a bit hung up on snapper. Give some of the other fish a go.”

Labels you can trust

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a joint venture between Unilever and the WWF, was set up in 1999. Its mission: to create a credible labeling system so consumers would know when fish had been sustainably caught.

These days it’s hard to know which labels are good and which are pure spin, but Professor Neill Herbert is adamant the MSC is the best way forward. “Fisheries will only get MSC certification if they can prove they’re actually sustainable and that they have minimal by-catch and are taking steps to reduce this.

“It’s a very powerful tool. Supermarket chains like Waitrose in the UK will only stock MSC-certified seafood. As long as the public are aware it’s sustainable, that’s what they want.”

Currently the MSC certifies 128 fisheries, representing about six per cent of the world total, with the label appearing on about 20,000 products worldwide.

It might cost a bit more, Herbert admits. “But you think it’s expensive now, then it’d get a hell of a lot more expensive if it’s fished unsustainably.

“I think consumers would rather pay more for sustainably-fished products knowing they’ll have them in 10 years’ time, than pay dirt cheap and see it wiped off the face of the planet.”

The MSC scheme is relatively new in New Zealand, with only a handful of products bearing the label, but it is growing fast.

Shoppers can keep an eye out for the distinctive blue fish logo, and can download a free smartphone app by searching ‘MSC seafood finder’.

Brands in New Zealand with the MSC label

• Birds Eye – frozen hoki fillets, frozen fish fillets (various)
• Blackmores – Eco Krill oil capsule supplements
• John West – canned wild Alaska salmon
• Larsen – canned herring, mackerel, kippers, mussels, salmon
• Neptune – frozen Aberdeen kippers
• Sealord – canned line-caught albacore tuna
• Talley’s – frozen hoki fillets
• Wild Ocean – frozen fish burgers, frozen fish portions
• Woolworths Select – canned wild-caught pink salmon, wild-caught red salmon

What you can do

Choose MSC-certified seafood

“MSC is still the best way forward,” argues the University of Auckland’s Dr Neill Herbert. Shoppers can use the free MSC app to find products with the eco label by searching ‘MSC seafood finder’. If in doubt, refer to the Forest & Bird Best Fish Guide.

Eat smarter

Fifty years ago, the average person ate about 6kg of fish a year. Today – remembering the world’s population has more than doubled – the average person eats 17kg, with New Zealanders scoffing 25kg each. Fish is good for you but you can eat small portions regularly and still get the benefits to your health. Two palm-sized 125g servings of oily fish a week is about right.

Learn some new recipes

Try some different varieties of fish. Sardines on toast is greatly underrated, and Forest & Bird have a raft of excellent recipes on their website (helpfully, also available as an iPhone app). Try Lauraine Jacobs’ tea-smoked kahawai, Al Brown’s Puspa and Magan’s sautéed masala herrings, or Annabel Langbein’s Cajun fish tacos (made with blue cod or tarakihi).