Fishing industry in New Zealand

Sea floor map around New Zealand

New Zealand's wild fisheries captured 441,000 tonnes and earned over one billion (NZ) dollars in exports in the fishing year 2006/07. The aquaculture of mussels, salmon and oysters earned another $226 million. This made seafood the country’s fifth largest export earner.

New Zealand’s 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) covers 4.1 million square kilometres. This is fifteen times the land area of New Zealand itself, and is the sixth largest zone in the world.

The zone has a rich and unusually complex underwater topography. Over 15,000 marine species are known to live there. Many of these are migratory species, but New Zealand's isolation means also that many of the marine species are unique to New Zealand.

Coastal estuaries dot New Zealand's 15,000 km coastline. Coastal fisheries have access to a large continental shelf, and further afield are large continental rises. Together these relatively shallow fishing grounds occupy about thirty percent of the area of the EEZ. Yet further out in the deep ocean lie undersea mountain ranges and volcanoes, and deep oceanic trenches. The 10,000 metre deep Kermadec Trench is the second deepest trench on Earth.

There are about two tonnes of fish in the New Zealand fisheries for every New Zealander. Just under ten percent of this stock is harvested each year. In the fishing year 2006/07, there were 1,316 commercial fishing vessels and 229 processors and licensed fish receivers, employing 7,155 people. About 1.2 million or 31 percent of New Zealanders engage, at least occasionally, in recreational fishing with an annual recreational take of about 25,000 tonnes.

Historical development

Traditionally New Zealand's fishing industry was an inshore one, and largely confined to the domestic market. Starting in the 1960s, the offshore waters, outside the then 12 nautical mile territorial sea, were exploited by Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korean, and Soviet trawlers.

External image
EEZ map

In 1977 the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone was established. The introduction of these zones was driven internationally by countries wanting to protect their fish stocks from foreign fishing vessels and manage them themselves. Because New Zealand’s territory includes the Chatham Islands and other outlying islands, its EEZ is 4.1 million square kilometres, the sixth largest fishing zone in the world.

This was a huge resource, and expectations were high. The inshore fisheries had become over exploited, and it seemed obvious to search offshore for new species. New Zealand companies embarked on joint ventures with foreign companies. Trawling crews from other nations taught New Zealanders how to fish deep waters and in return got a share of the catch.

Deep-water trawling is highly mechanised and massive capital investment is normally required to operate modern factory trawlers. These ships process everything caught on board. Even the guts and heads are processed into fishmeal, which is so valuable it is known as "brown gold". In the northern hemisphere the cod and other fisheries collapsed. This left trawlers lying idle. New Zealand companies purchased them at bargain prices or took long-term leases on modern trawlers. At the same time, the collapse of the northern hemisphere fisheries created a gap in the international market for high quality white fleshed fish. New Zealand orange roughy and hoki were in demand.

In 1986 New Zealand led the world by introducing its property-rights based quota management system (QMS) system. There are currently (2008) 129 species which are targeted commercially. Approximately 60 species groupings have QMS allowances for customary Maori fishers and there are a similar number for recreational fishers. The fisheries are managed through the Fisheries Act 1996, which sets out the rules and regulations and the QMS administered by the Ministry of Fisheries.

Māori role

Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. They came to New Zealand from eastern Polynesia, probably in several waves, around 1300. Under the Treaty of Waitangi Māori were guaranteed “undisturbed possession” of their fisheries until they wished to dispose of them to the Crown. They have been provided with a substantial stake in commercial fishing as part of the Treaty Settlement. After the quota management system was established, the government bought back ten percent of the quota shares and gave it to the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission for the benefit of Māori. In 1992, the government gave Māori a cash settlement which was used to buy half of Sealord, New Zealand’s biggest fishing company. In addition, the government has given Maori twenty percent of the commercial quota shares of any new species brought into the quota management system, and the equivalent of twenty percent of all marine farming space created around New Zealand coasts and harbours. In 2004, Parliament approved the distribution to iwi of substantial further fisheries assets and this is now being implemented by Te Ohu Kai Moana. Māori have now built their commercial stake to the point where they control or influence more than thirty percent of the commercial fisheries.

Timeline

• 1300s: Arrival of Māori
• 1642: Tasman is first European to reach New Zealand.
• 1769: New Zealand mapped by James Cook, and the Norway rat believed to have arrived in New Zealand aboard his ship, the Endeavour.
• 1790s: Sealers and whalers arrive.
• 1867: Trout and Salmon Protection Act passed - made provision for "the preservation and propagation of Salmon and Trout in this Colony".
• 1875: Seal hunting restricted to a short annual season.
• 1893: Rainbow trout successfully introduced by the Auckland Acclimatisation Society.
• 1894: Protection of fur seal population due to declining numbers.
• 1967: Rudd is illegally introduced into New Zealand.
• 1971: CoEnCo formed
• 1976: CoEnCo renamed as ECO
• 1977: The "Territorial Sea and Exclusive Economic Zone Act" is passed.
• 1979: Marine Mammals Protection Act came into force.
• 1983: Fisheries Act comes into force (establishes a fishing quota system).
• 1986: Environment Act passed (establishes Ministry for the Environment (MfE) and Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE)) ]
• 1986: Quota Management System (QMS) introduced to conserve fish stocks within the Exclusive Economic Zone.
• 1987: Conservation Act comes into force (establishes DoC, Fish and Game)
• 1990: Creation of Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site. ]
• 1990: Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is formed.
• 1996: Fisheries Act 1996 is passed (though parts of it come into force only spasmodically over the next few years).
• 1998: Creation of New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands World Heritage site.
• 2000: Moratorium on new marine farming applications, initially for two years.
• 2003: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry for the Environment, and Fonterra sign the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord.
• 2003: Environment Minister addresses pollution in the Rotorua lakes.
• 2004: Rock snot, (Didymosphenia geminata), an invasive freshwater weed, is found in some New Zealand rivers.
• 2004: Nitrates an increasing problem in Canterbury's groundwater.
• 2004: 13,000 litre diesel spill in Milford Sound.
• 2004: Moratorium on marine farms lifted after the passing of the Aquaculture Reform Bill. [2]
• 2005: Pesticides blamed for killing native frogs.
• 2005: First criminal conviction for killing a fur seal is handed down.
• 2005: Rock snot found in the Buller River. [3]
• 2006: New Zealand is rated top in the Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index.
• 2006: The New Zealand fishing industry proposes limits on bottom trawling.
• 2006: The WWF Living Planet report ranks New Zealand with the ninth largest per capita ecological footprint. [4] [5]
• 2006: Great white sharks will be protected within New Zealand's EEZ from April 2007. [6]
• 2007: Bottom trawling prohibited in selected areas.
• 2007: The orange roughy fishery is closed to allow stocks of the fish to recover.
• 2008: Environment New Zealand 2007, a State of the Environment report, is released.