Fishing limit decisions 'guesswork'

INFORMATION POOR: Research into population size and sustainable catch levels is so limited that it cannot keep up with the dynamic nature of fish stocks, says Niwa chief fisheries scientist John McKoy.

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One of New Zealand's pre-eminent fisheries scientists says decisions on commercial fishing limits are essentially guesswork and "highly susceptible to influence".

Speaking in an online forum on the science behind fisheries management in New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research's chief fisheries scientist John McKoy said the information used to set commercial catch limits needed to be improved.

"For most fish stocks we don't know much at all – in other words you guess."

As such the Fisheries Minister's annual decisions on commercial catch limits were ambiguous, informal and vulnerable to outside pressure. "There's an opportunity to use better organised and better thought-through decision processes. The current process is highly susceptible to influence from vested interests," Dr McKoy said.

Fisheries research funding had more than halved since the mid 1990s, while the list of commercially fished species was growing each year. "Essentially less and less is known about more and more."

Of the 96 stocks in the quota management system, research targeted the most valuable species as those were what interested fishing companies who paid for the research.

"At the moment we distribute most of our resources in too few of our species." Dr McKoy said a process to reallocate the limited amount of money for fisheries research to less valuable species would provide at least some information to make "better" decisions.

"The natural tendency is to focus resources on the bigger, more important species. There's certainly no incentive for anybody to focus on what might be the more ecologically important issues or the minor species."

Dr McKoy said it was dangerous to ignore the lesser species because the impact on them could indirectly affect more profitable species. "We do not understand the dynamics of the systems in New Zealand, not enough to provide reliable advice."

The Government needed to put more independent money into the pot, he said.

Fisheries Ministry chief scientist Rich Ford said the resources for fisheries science were limited, even more so in a recession, and the result was a tradeoff between making informed decisions and what could be afforded.

"More money could be going into fisheries management from the Government as well, but there's not a lot of quick and easy fixes."

Dr McKoy said the huge level of uncertainty in fisheries research was not going to change if funding was left as an industry responsibility.

Research was expensive, an onus on fishermen who already had work to do, and could eventually be used to limit catch levels further, so there was little incentive for the industry to promote more science.

Scientific ambiguity could also be used to legally challenge the minister's decisions.

"The uncertainty that exists is a good handy tool to have if you don't want change," Dr McKoy said.

Research into population size and sustainable catch levels was so limited that it could not keep up with the dynamic nature of fish stocks, he said. "The whole system is information hungry, it's on a starvation diet at the moment."

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