Every commercial fishing boat will be fitted with a camera and “real time” reporting and monitoring system under a proposal that may also see the number of fisheries observers halved in the next few years.
The new computerised system may see the number of observers drop from 105 to about 50, and would allow officials to check the exact amount of each fish species being caught each day, Ministry of Primary Industries director of fisheries management Dave Turner said.
The “integrated electronic monitoring and reporting system”, or IEMRS, which combined reporting, vessel positioning systems and cameras, would replace the current “very cumbersome, old and slow” paper-based system by which crews manually wrote down their catches, Turner said.
Instead they would enter fishing data into a device such as an iPad or tablet as they were fishing. This would be transmitted back to shore, along with data on the location and time of the catch, and footage of the catch brought aboard.
“We can know what they’ve caught, where they’ve caught it, when they’ve caught it, and then look at video footage to verify what they’ve caught,” Turner said.
“At the moment we rely on self-reported catch information from fishermen, and we rely on them telling us where they were.
“In the vast majority of cases it’s accurate. There is always one or two who don’t play the game. If we have timely, accurate, verifiable data, we can manage our fisheries better.
“Ninety-nine per cent of these guys are doing the right thing. It’s their livelihood. They want to be able to say, hand on heart, ‘Watch the video footage, we are doing a good job and we’re fishing responsibly,’ and they see this as the foolproof way of them being able to prove that.”
Federation of Commercial Fishermen president Doug Saunders-Loder said some operators might see the scheme as a “personal imposition”.
“If we can use some tools to gather more information then well and good, but the camera is not the answer in the eyes of the inshore owner-operator. We’ve got more work to do with the management of our fisheries before we just impose that on fishermen.”
Turner said catch information was critical when it came to managing fish stocks, and the more immediately the information was received, the better.
“At the moment we employ about 105 observers who go out on our fishing fleet. We have something like 1300 commercial vessels in New Zealand. It’s impossible to get observers on every boat on every trip …”
The proposal follows a trial in the Auckland snapper fleet of 21 boats, which was already using GPS monitoring and cameras.
“We’ve done our trials. We’ve determined this is the right solution for New Zealand fisheries,” Turner said.
The proposal would now be submitted to the ministry’s director-general. A decision on whether to proceed could be made in the next two months, and IEMRS could be on all commercial boats within 2½ years.
It was too early to tell what the final cost would be.
Scott Macindoe, of recreational fishers’ organisation LegaSea, said he welcomed the proposal. “It’s news to me, but I look forward to hearing more about it, and seeing some results.”
2015 Fairfax New Zealand Limited