Clayton's Benthic Protected Area consultation

Industry Uses Clayton's Trawling Closure to Escape Environmental Controls

The Minister of Fisheries is currently consulting on proposals by the fishing industry to prohibit bottom trawling on 30 percent of the New Zealand 's EEZ. (this page is also available here as a word doc, 44kb)

Submissions close on 9 June with the Ministry of Fisheries:

Kristin Philbert, Ministry of Fisheries, PO Box 1020 , Wellington , (04) 470 2585; or email Kristin.Philbert@fish.govt.nz

On a shallow look these proposals seem great - it is after all one of the first acknowledgments by the New Zealand fishing industry that bottom trawling is a destructive practice. It shows it is relatively easy to conserve large areas of our 200 mile zone despite previous claims to contrary by the fishing industry. But don't be fooled.

The proposal from the fishing industry for closures mostly covers areas not a risk from fishing anyway. Worse, the trade they want for this is for freedom from environmental controls elsewhere, and opening up some of the 19 seamounts already closed to fishing. About half of the area proposed is already off-limits to the fishing industry: the big closure around the Kermadecs to the north, the rest is "foul ground" they can't fish, or it is unproductive, like the stretch in the middle of the Chatham Rise, or is too deep to fish.

The industry proposals are weak when compared to international moves. A number of countries have banned bottom trawling throughout their 200 mile EEZs ( Palau , Kiribati , and New Caledonia ), and the fishing zones around the Canary, Azores and Madeira Islands . Bottom trawling has been banned in the Mediterranean in depths greater than 1000m.

In the US , bottom trawling has been banned in federally controlled waters (three miles to 200 miles) off the coasts of California , Oregon , and Washington . Alaska has moved to ban bottom trawling over an area larger than the NZ industry proposal to try to protect coral beds and other sensitive fish habitat. It includes more than half the fishable water around the Aleutians .

Internationally over 1000 foremost marine scientists are urging countries to establish a moratorium on bottom trawling on the High Seas. They also called on states to ban bottom trawling to protect deep-sea ecosystems wherever cold-water coral forests and reefs are known to occur within their EEZ. Cold water corals are known to live for hundreds of years and grow to 5 or more metres above the seafloor.

Bottom trawling, for species like the long-lived orange roughy or deepwater dory, is amongst the most destructive methods of fishing. Thousands of square kilometres of bottom sea-floor has been swept clean of much of its previous biodiversity of large cold-water coral, sponges, bryozoans and a range of other unique critters. Given these impacts and our poor knowledge of marine biodiversity, extinctions are likely without these species being catalogued.

The industry proposals are supposedly based on an ecologically representative approach to protection. The trouble is these proposals were cooked up by the industry in secret without much scientific input. There has been no independent review of the proposal by the experts at NIWA and none looks likely to take place. The Ministry for the Environment hosted a meeting to determine broad brush ecological areas, but it was a closed meeting and ECO and other organisations were denied access. The ecological areas defined are far too broad to be useful for this sort of management and anyway have not been subject to proper scrutiny.

But is the industry actually giving up anything? Very little of the area proposed by the industry to be closed to bottom trawling has or will ever be trawled - most of it is just too deep (84.5 percent of the closures are deeper than 1500m) or there are no fish there in economic quantities to trawl.

The fishing industry wants drastically to weaken existing protection of 19 seamounts closed to fishing under the Fisheries Act by cutting the area protected and totally to remove protection from one of the features, the Pinnie in the western end of the South Chatham Rise.

Behind the draft industry agreement with the Minister of Fisheries there is a further agenda to ensure that:

•  protection goes no further ie these proposals are not turned in to marine reserves and no additional areas are protected:

•  there are no marine reserves in the EEZ (ie beyond the 12 nautical mile limit) and no extension of Marine Reserves Act to the EEZ;

•  there are no additional controls on bottom trawling to protect biodiversity;

•  bottom trawling and its associated impacts can expand in areas not covered;

•  the draft marine classification system developed by the Ministry for the Environment becomes the approved classification system.

Key points:

The main issues in the industry bottom trawl proposals are:

•  The proposal applies to areas which are either too deep to economically fish (below 1500m, have no fish, are too difficult to trawl, or, like the area around the Kermadecs, are already closed). Fishing in these areas is anyway less likely given the direction of fuel prices - deepwater trawling is very energy intensive with over 1 tonne of diesel per tonne of fish.

•  Over 50 percent of the proposal is within 200 nautical miles of the Kermadecs - an area that is too deep to trawl and includes the Kermadec Trench which reaches a maximum depth of 10,047 m.

•  The industry wants to undermine the current prohibitions on trawling on the 19 seamounts (including hills and drop-offs) protected in 2001. They want to allow trawling to within about 10 metres of the bottom - a proposal which ignores the ecological relationship between orange roughy and other species caught and seabed biodiversity. This proposal was rejected five years ago by a previous Minister of Fisheries, Pete Hodgson. He did not buy the proposal to allow mid-water trawling. While the industry might claim that mid-water trawling is a benign technique this fails to acknowledge that, for example, half the mid-water trawls in the hoki fishery scrap the bottom.

•  The industry wants to remove total protection from the Pinnie a hill feature on the South-southwestern Chatham Rise. It is the only hill protected in this part of the Rise and is surrounded by an area which has been heavily trawled for deepwater dory. The reason for its protection was canvassed in 2000-01.

•  The industry does not propose to reduce current areas trawled for deepwater species like orange roughy or deepwater dory, or to reduce their expansion into new areas to trawl for orange roughy.

•  Few areas of high productivity are proposed to be closed eg western Chatham Rise.

•  There are no representative of two types of seamounts (Hikurangi Plateau, east of Hawkes Bay , and Macquarie Ridge, south-east of Fiordland) within the proposed protection or current 19 seamounts protected.are located (within the New Zealand EEZ

•  The industry proposals rely on a marine classification system developed with restricted participation by the Ministry for the Environment and which has not been put out for public comment as required by the new marine protected area policy. The system is unlikely to survive close scrutiny as it fails to delineate between areas of high productivity and low productivity - it's like saying there is no difference between mountain beech forests and lowland beech-podocarp forests.

•  The industry wants to use their proposals to change the Fisheries Act so that these proposals are considered as an offset for current trawling, so giving little incentive to improve on trawling or to "avoid, remedy or mitigate the adverse effects of fishing" as required the Purpose of the 1996 Fisheries Act.

•  The proposals only apply to bottom trawling and do not apply to mid-water trawling - this is a large loophole as a significant proportion of mid-water trawls touch the bottom (eg half of hoki fishery mid-water trawls);

•  There is currently no agreed protection standard or classification system as required by the Marine Protected Areas Policy Statement and Implementation Plan. Until the standard and system are consulted the Minister has no criteria to assess the industry proposals.

•  The areas are only for the deepwater so it does not deal with inshore trawling (less the 200m).

•  The proposal does not control other fishing methods or other potential impacts on biodiversity eg mining.

In summary these proposals need wider scientific scrutiny.

•  All trawling and dredging should be prohibited in a third of the EEZ but those areas must include places currently trawled with high productivity and biodiversity, and protect cold-water corals and sensitive habitat, and seamounts (including hills and ridges).

•  There should be no going back on current measures agreed in 2001 to protect all of the 19 "seamounts" - which are only 19 of about 680 in the areas New Zealand manages.

•  Many of the closed areas should be converted into marine reserves eg the world heritage areas around the Sub-Antarctic Islands .

•  Areas of high biodiversity or high productivity for example on the Western end of the Chatham Rise should also be protected;

•  All types of seamounts should be protected including representatives of those found on the Macquarie ridge and Hikurangi Plateau.

A review is needed of areas currently impacted by trawling and the industry should move to other methods of fishing which don't require trawling, eg jigging for squid or the use of pots.

Submissions close on 9 June 2006 with: Kristin Philbert, Ministry of Fisheries, PO Box 1020 , Wellington , (04) 470 2585; or email Kristin.Philbert@fish.govt.nz

For further information on the proposals see http://www.fish.govt.nz/sustainability/bpa/

See also Deep Sea Coalition website on High Sea Moratorium on Bottom Trawling and the impacts of bottom trawling at http://www.savethehighseas.org/news.cfm