New Zealand is the first nation to sign a new international fish management convention – but only after an extraordinary free-for-all that saw most of the region’s jack mackerel plundered.
Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully and Primary Industries Minister David Carter announced the creation of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), which will manage waters from Western Australia to South America, including the Tasman Sea and South Pacific Ocean.
“This is the culmination of six years of work by the New Zealand Government,” McCully said.
The new convention will manage all fish species in the South Pacific apart from highly migratory ones, which are managed separately.
“Now the convention is in force, the next job is agreeing legally binding controls to manage the fisheries, help ensure their long-term sustainability and address any adverse effects on the environment,” Carter said.
Earlier this year, Wellington international law expert and SPRFMO chairman Bill Mansfield alerted the world to a rapidly worsening environmental and nutrition disaster in the wake of the plunder of South Pacific mackerel.
The disturbing way jack mackerel has been targeted sparked headlines, including in the New York Times.
Mansfield warned that what was happening to the stock was “of great significance for the food security and economic development of the countries of the region over the long term”.
SPRFMO was partly set up in a New Zealand move in 2006 to try to save the huge Chilean jack mackerel stock that lives in the South Pacific.
But according to the New York Times, it took SPRFMO four years to agree to an outline agreement while industrial fleets bound only by voluntary restraints competed in a free-for-all between Chile and New Zealand.
It said aggressive fishing had decimated jack mackerel stocks in the past two decades – from 30 million metric tons to less than three million.
The Chilean stock – which was found off New Zealand’s east coast until recently but has now disappeared – is distinct from the New Zealand jack mackerel stock, which may now be one of the world’s least touched fisheries.
Mansfield outlined the disaster in opening remarks at the organisation’s Santiago meeting earlier this year.
“Between the time of our first meeting in 2006 and the end of last year, jack mackerel total biomass is estimated to have declined by 63 per cent to its historically lowest levels – now estimated to be only about 14 per cent of the unfished biomass level,” he said.
“Spawning biomass is estimated to be only 5 per cent of the unfished level, confirming that this is one of the most depleted major fish stocks under the responsibility of (a fish management organisation) anywhere in the world.”
Mansfield urged member states to get the negotiated convention into force quickly, saying it was their duty.
“Regrettably, the world’s fish stocks, and the marine ecosystems that support them, continue to be placed under severe and increasing pressure,” he said.
“At the same time, the capacity of the world fishing fleets remains far greater than that which can be sustained by our fishery resources, resulting in ongoing over-fishing of many stocks.”
Fairfax NZ News