We are a coastal nation with an Exclusive Economic Zone fifteen times larger than our land area and we are a coastal people who work, rest and play on and under the water. For many our waters are our supermarkets, and our playgrounds. Kiwis love our ocean but often when it comes to policy ‘out of sight’ is ‘out of mind.’

A staggering 80% of all the life on Earth is to be found hidden beneath the waves yet our oceans are in crisis. Climate change, acidification, overfishing, pollution, and ocean drilling and mining all imperil the oceans. Today is World Oceans Day and a good chance to celebrate our oceans and reflect on their health.

Humans are slowly yet constantly changing the acidity levels of our oceans through our ever-growing production of carbon dioxide. Our oceans naturally absorb CO2 and the impacts will be devastating: the UN reports that 80% of the world’s coral reefs may die within decades. New Zealand’s Royal Society has warned that our marine life will also be severely affected within decades, impacting on our food supply and jobs.

At the rate we are overfishing our oceans we should get used to replacing the ‘fish’ in fish ‘n chips with jellyfish. We are hammering fish stocks with advanced technology and constantly moving on to other species down the food chain once we’ve depleted one species. It’s like we’ve declared war on fish with all of our technological and industrial might so that when asked the question – ‘where did the fish go?’ the answer is clear – “we’ve eaten them.”

Even fearsome predators sharks aren’t immune, with an estimated 73 million slaughtered each year internationally for the shark-fin trade and some species declining as much as 90%. New Zealand is one of the few developed fishing nations that still allows sharks to be killed just for their fins with their bodies dumped into the ocean, a huge waste, akin to killing elephants for their ivory.

Down in the Southern Ocean in New Zealand waters, the Greens believe in a smart Green economy that delivers prosperity and protects the environment. We want Kiwi fishers kids to be able to make a sustainable livelihood fishing well into the future.

We want to see a vibrant Kiwi fishing industry and that’s why we supported the call for an inquiry into foreign fishing vessels in our waters, many with atrocious records, at Select Committee.

Our sea food industry depends on healthy marine ecosystems but the health of our oceans is under threat from a wide range of sources. One new risk comes from the increased likelihood of deep sea oil drilling. Our Government has given permits to oil companies to explore in areas much deeper than the Deepwater Horizon rig that leaked in the Gulf of Mexico, despite lacking adequate resources to respond to a spill. The Petroleum Exploration and Production Association recently admitted that, at present, a beach clean-up is the only practical response to a major spill off the coast of New Zealand. They have no intention of bringing the latest well capping technology to New Zealand and, even if they did, there is no assurance that it will work here.

Acting Minister of Energy and Resources Hekia Parata stated in Parliament recently  that a team of 400 emergency response workers is on hand to respond to a spill in New Zealand waters (woefully inadequate given that nearly 50,000 were needed at the peak of the oil leak response in the Gulf of Mexico). An oil spill would devastate the New Zealand sea food industry and would tarnish our clean green image, currently worth an estimated $18 billion. The Green Party is calling for a moratorium on deep water drilling until the industry can demonstrate that it can safely control any leak.

We often hear how ‘sustainable’ New Zealand’s Quota-managed fisheries are, however we are measuring ourselves against a pretty bad global average. The Green Party supports protecting the long-term viability of the sea food industry by promoting sustainable utilisation of fisheries. We would achieve this by moving to integrated marine ecosystem management to ensure that fish populations are maintained at ecologically sustainable levels rather than single species stock management. Furthermore, we would manage all fish stock by maintaining the population which supports the maximum sustainable yield as a minimum, not a target level.

The Green Party strongly supports the creation of more marine reserves. The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy (2000) had a goal of 10% of New Zealand’s marine environment in a network of Marine Protected Areas by 2010, and yet, in 2011, we dismally failed and only have only 0.3% in marine reserves. Meanwhile the Minister of Conservation is declining applications like those in Akaroa Harbour. I think this is unacceptable and the public overwhelmingly agrees. A recent Colmar-Brunton survey showed that 96% of New Zealanders think a larger proportion of their oceans should be protected in marine reserves than currently is the case.

This Government meanwhile is pushing an ambitious aquaculture agenda, but has not yet created a marine spatial plan for New Zealand to determine where aquaculture is suitable. I fear we are on the cusp of a massive privitization of our public marine space.

The promotion of fin-fish farming is of particular concern because it can have significant impacts on the marine environment. Most farmed finfish are fed pellets derived from wild fish stocks, and international figures show it can take between four and six tonnes of wild fish to produce one tonne of farmed fish. This poor rate of conversion, localised pollution and the threat of escaped farmed-fish puts further pressure on our already stressed wild fisheries and marine ecosystems.

With the increasing pressure on our oceans and the lack of adequate integrated protection of our marine ecosystems, we need oceans governance reform.

New Zealand currently has no agency responsible for oceans management, no legal framework for marine spatial planning in the EEZ, no EEZ environmental assessment legislation, and no EEZ marine protected areas legislation, and this has to change. We support a Royal Commission on Oceans Governance to investigate and develop recommendations for oceans reform.

Whilst there have been some admirable improvements, the protection of marine mammals and seabirds from the impacts of fishing activity has not been effective. The Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Wildlife Act make provisions for the preparation of population management plans to address fishing-related mortality for mammals and seabirds respectively, yet, no such plans have been completed. (A staggering 62% of our ocean-going seabirds are listed as threatened). Furthermore, under the Marine Mammals Protection Act, marine mammal sanctuaries can be established in the EEZ, but none have been created.

My favourite iconic fish is the Orange Roughy, a deep sea fish living to over 100 years and whose populations have been hammered by bottom trawling. They’ve been fished down to as much as 3% of their original stock levels in some fisheries, and are in long-term decline. I’ve personally seen kiwi fishers throw overboard man-sized ancient corals ripped off the ocean floor in the Tasman Sea, and I am concerned deeply about bottom trawling’s impact on marine ecosystems.

Hoki, one of our largest fisheries, is also struggling and heading the same way as Orange Roughy. Despite this, Hoki are certified as sustainable under the international Marine Stewardship Council. Pretending Hoki are sustainable will not serve the fish or the fishing industry well – continued decline will have massive economic and ecological impacts on New Zealand. Last year Waitrose, the UK supermarket chain used by the royal family, announced it no longer stocked New Zealand caught hoki as it failed to meet the store’s sustainability policy prompting headlines reading ‘No hoki for the Queen.’ A number of international supermarkets now refuse to stock our Orange Roughy.

Sustainability is not a luxury – it is essential to ensure we have a healthy ocean, fish for food, and jobs in the long term. Overfishing now destroys the economy of the future. Killing marine mammals and seabirds unnecessarily puts our valuable ‘clean green brand’ at risk. Nature Magazine assessed New Zealand against the United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries – we scored just 56%. It’s not good enough.

Our ocean is not “out of sight, out of mind”; it is the backyard, the pantry and a source of pride for all New Zealanders. It is not too late to reverse the decline, and it makes economic sense to do so now. Let’s mark World Oceans Day by committing to strong action on climate change, a good Oceans Policy, and making our fisheries truly sustainable.

“The End of the Line” was beautifully shot, had great music and was well described as an “environmental snuff movie’. Where have all the fish gone in the sea? We have eaten them!

The panel discussion that followed was lively because one of people in the film who was claiming fish stocks are less depleted than others were claiming was in the audience. He said that recent research states that NZ has well managed fisheries which beat many countries described in the film. This claim was refuted by the panel that were well aware of the global research on 19 NZ fish stocks out of the 600 species and the fact that orange roughy was not included in the study.

There was also good discussion on the credibility of the Marine Stewardship Certification of fish stocks and also a lone tangata whenua voice calling for dialogue with indigenous fishers who have sustained their local fisheries for generations.

I recommend this film, which will be part of the documentary film festival in Wellington this month. It’s true that my daughter is the NZ distributor but even if she wasn’t I would recommend you see it. It reminded me how fabulous and mysterious the ocean species are and how crazy we are to destroy it.

Consumer power is critical in this campaign for our own food sources as well as the integrity of the fish species!

Greenpeace Red Fish List

Forest & Bird Best Fish Guide

In September 2009 the New York Times gave these concerns international attention by highlighting that the hoki industry may not be the picture of ocean sustainability it claimed to be. Hoki (Macruronus novaezealandiae) is the primary ingredient in Filet-o-Fish and McDonald’s branches worldwide rely on it.

The New Zealand Seafood Industry Council found this hard to stomach and acted by buying google adwords for kewords like New Zealand, hoki, New York Times and Laura Chang (the New York Times editor).

This apparently comes at a cost of $300-500 per day, but with McDonald’s buying millions of dollars of hoki each year, the investment in managing the information available to consumers is obviously worth it. One of the benefits of this PR investment was that it enabled the Seafood Council to link the word hoki in the New York Times article to a Seafood Council web page, which essentially provides their rebuttal to the article.

Each year the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society publishes a consumer guide, which ranks the ecological sustainability of seafood from our commercial fisheries.  Forest and Bird ranks hoki an ‘E: Red – worst choice’ in it’s Best Fish Guide 09-10, which frog posted on earlier.

The guide is becoming increasingly popular and this year gained the support of nationwide burger chain, Burger Wisconsin who followed Forest and Bird’s advice and switched from deepwater dory to the more sustainable tarakihi. The Seafood Council has recognised the influence of the Best Fish Guide in it’s own way. The Council bought the URL www.bestfishguide.com, which now links – you guessed it – to a Seafood Council webpage with a ‘Great Fish Guide’ – a guide on the best ways to prepare and eat seafood!

I’d much rather the Seafood Council invested their PR money in researching ways to manage truly sustainable fisheries.

Dear Editor

Well, the dolphin observer program has come to an end and, might I hazard to say, with some very positive results.

Our worst fears of being landed with some hairy armpit, tattooed Green who was coming on board to rip us to bits never bore fruit. Instead, we got a very pleasant young marine biologist who had just completed her degree at uni. She came on board and approached her job with a high degree of professionalism and was very open about the job that she was there to do.

She was up all hours of the day and night observing almost every shot, noted mitigation devices in operation and the interaction with the dolphins, integrated well with the crew and when not doing her work she was always quick to jump up and make a brew, roll a smoke for the boys, or throw a meal together – she did a better job than my lads, that’s for real.

The general feedback I have had from the other boats is that they had a similar experience with their observers.

I hope that the information that has been gathered will go a long way to dispel the general public’s impression that we are nothing but dolphin-murdering, albatross-munching ocean rapists. I’d like to think that some of the half-truths and lies will be replaced with some real facts, reinforcing the view that we are just normal conservation-minded Kiwis, working in an increasingly hostile environment, who do care about the seabirds and mammals we share the ocean with.

All in all, it was a very painless experience.

Rosco Dillion, Skipper, FV Frontier

 The FV Frontier

It is of course a serious issue for more than just the ‘money for policy‘ reasons.  New Zealand’s fisheries are desperately depleted by commercial fishing and the government needs to take urgent action to protect one of our most important environmental and economic assets.  The suggestion that some politicians are making decisions on this issue for other, less ethical reasons is deeply troubling.

Image Credit: Mark Frauenfelder at Thumb Tack Press

For more than a decade, marine scientists and communicators have been trying to convey just how profoundly the biological bounty of the seas has been stripped away in the last half century. Some have done so through field research showing extraordinary declines in fish populations and the way boats have had to venture ever farther from port to fill holds. Some, like Carl Safina and Richard Ellis, have written compelling books on the vanished and vanishing.

(The links are all worth following.)

Green Party Fisheries spokesperson Metiria Turei put up an amendment to the Bill to ensure that in the face of stock uncertainty, the TAC should not be increased. If they were, it would breach the precautionary principle and would obviously be unsustainable.

Preventing increases would also incentivise the research to get quantitative estimates so we can be certain the catch is sustainable. We invest less today on stock assessment research than we did 15 years ago. In real terms, it is under half what was spent in the early 1990s.

Unfortunately, most parties in Parliament are quite happy to see our fisheries continue to be exploited, despite their rhetorical commitments to sustainability. The only party to support Metiria’s amendment was the Maori Party, and they deserve credit for that.

Very soon the Minister must set a TAC for bluenose, which has woefully inadequate information on fish stocks. At least he can now set the TAC, but the fact that the law allows him to increase the TAC in this situation is outrageous.
Fortunately, the Fisheries Act is up for a review next year, and the Greens will be in flippers and all. The EU has realised its QMS is flawed is also undertaking a full review at the moment.

The whole thing stinks of rotten scampi, but nevertheless, the burden of proof lies with the accuser in such cases.  As I write the committee is still in committee, so I am not making any insider’s announcement here. I just think that Peters’ tale is about to become the classic tale of the big one that got away.

What remains to be seen is whether or not the electorate sides with the black and white condemnation of Mr Key or the innocent until proven guilty style of Helen Clark come November 8th. It will also be interesting to see how harshly Peters is judged at the polls.

Whatever happens, I have no doubt that the size of the fish that got away will grow with every telling of the story, from now until November!

Our oceans carry less than a tenth the number of fish they once held, yet few of us have any sense that something is wrong.

Good examines the massive collapse of fish stocks and the fishing industry in New England and Cape Cod, noting that industrial fishing has plundered 9 tenths of large predatory fish (like tuna, swordfish, cod, halibut) in the last fifty years. And worse, we may have only 40 years left before our worldwide supplies completely collapse.

The demise of commercial fishing is beyond the limits of even our darkest environmental imaginations. And yet the evidence of the ocean’s diminishment is everywhere. Leaving aside the legitimate concerns of conservationists, the possibility of a broad fish collapse is harrowing for other reasons. At a time when we are mired in a global food crisis, nearly 1.5 billion people depend upon the sea as a source of food or income. The destabilizing effect of such a collapse would be tremendous, bringing communities and countries into conflict over a resource we once considered boundless. It is fair to say that the endgame has begun.

And:

We have imperiled what is perhaps the last wilderness on earth, for the simplest reason: We believed it was so vast it couldn’t be harmed. The signs of our folly are now too numerous to ignore. Massive, swirling gyres of plastic have formed in the North Pacific, as have toxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and dozens more places. Coastal pollution and construction is destroying critical wetland habitats worldwide. And the ocean itself is warming, a development that will have consequences we can hardly imagine. Amid these challenges, overfishing represents the most immediate threat and possibly the easiest problem to remedy.

That’s a gloomy scenario. Yet, the solution is a relatively simple, quick and effective one: we need to safeguard large segments of our oceans to allow them to recover:  Good suggests up to 20% of all the world’s oceans.

In places where fishing has been halted, recovery can be measured over a relatively short period of time. The ocean’s floor begins to return to a natural state, fish populations start to rebound, and fishermen experience a surge in catch as fish migrate beyond protected waters.

* Good’s article cites New Zealand as a sustainable fishing success story.  Sadly Greenpeace’s Red Fish guide suggests this is not the case.

The two players in the story are firstly Senegal, one of the poorest countries on the planet, where the people mostly eat fish. They get 70 percent of their protein from fish:

Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population that ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; about two-thirds of these workers are women.

and the European Union, whose people’s also like to eat fish:

The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to west Africa.

As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s waters fell from 95,000 tonnes to 45,000 tonnes. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.

That’s a lot of unnecessary hunger. So Senegal has responded by trying to refuse to allow European fishers to fish its waters. It isn’t getting a sympathetic hearing.

[European Trade Commissioner] Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people.

These sorts of ‘national treatment’ clauses are the bedrock foundations of most all ‘free’ trade agreements, and probably the reason why local communities never seem to have much of a say in whether treaties should be signed or not.

Monbiot concludes:

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but – in the short term, at any rate – we will hardly notice. The rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.

Europe, like New Zealand, has plenty of waters in which it can grow and catch fish.   Both need either to change the amount and way we consume fish, and to invest in rebuilding fish stocks so that they can be sustainably caught. Despite our massive territorial waters New Zealand still buys a lot of ‘foreign’ fish. It’s absolutely wrong that countries that misuse their own food baskets should be able to use their comparative wealth to shelter themselves from their unsustainable mistakes at the expense of other, poorer peoples.

And the second book as a spot prize goes to Umbatata who sent several photos including this shark head.  Metiria says: ‘I am prone to the gruesome and this photo was very cool.’

Congrats to Dave and Umbatata.  Send us an email to frogblog at greens dot org dot nz with your postal address and we’ll get your books to you in the post.   Thanks to all the other entrants too.

Meanwhile Metiria has just launched a petition calling on the Government to take urgent action to halt the over-exploitation of one of those fish – tuna:

Today, well over 4000 large foreign fishing vessels are plundering the Pacific waters. Technological advances mean large ships can catch as many fish in two days as a small Pacific nation can in a year. With tuna stocks decreasing in other oceans, more and more ships are moving into the Pacific. These practices are not sustainable.

Greenpeace says of tuna:

Foreign fleets  from Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, the US and the EU take 90% of Pacific tuna, and pay Pacific Island countries only around 6% of the landed catch value – of around $US3 billion. Pirate fishing exacerbates overfishing and seriously undermines any efforts to manage or conserve stocks. Pacific islanders are being robbed of the fish that is their primary source of protein, and the backbone of their economies.

Which means that we have  social justice and poverty problem as well as an environmental one.  Greenpeace says that the by-catch for Southern Bluefin Tuna can be up to twenty times greater than the amount of tuna caught, and can include threatened marine birds, turtles and fur seals.  It recommends if you want to eat tuna:

… select skipjack tuna instead, but make sure it is either from the New Zealand fisheries (where the cooler waters avoid the bycatch of other tuna species)  or  from Pacific catches that use trolling or pole an line. Avoid skipjack from the  Pacific purse seiner fisheries because they end up catching large amounts of immature bigeye and yellowfin who school together with skipjack.

The other eleven fish to avoid buying are orange roughy, oreo, shark, hoki, hake, swordfish, snapper, arrow squid, shrimp, patagonian toothfish and flatfish or flounder. And so, peripherally related, Robert Guyton has sent us this entry for our fish competition:

Here is my photo of flatfish! I found a glass fish plate, made a fibre-glass impression, poured concrete and made a dozen of these to affix to a concrete wall

Frog blog has this cool creative competition up to win a copy of “The Last Fish Tale – the fate of the Atlantic and our disappearing fisheries�? by Mark Kurlansky.

I thought, ‘yeah I can draw a fish!’ but it turns out I’m quite crap at drawing. I am pretty good at designing cross stitch patterns though so I decided to do one of them instead. So my pattern looks like this:

And I decided that I’d use this pattern to raise funds. So I’m voiding myself from the competition but hopefully you’ll enter instead! (and lend it to me if you win )

I have the epattern up for sale in my Etsy store. It comes with all the colour codes to make this Rooster Fish come to life, and full instructions on how to cross stitch. But I’ll also give a free copy of this pattern and one other from my store to anyone who joins the Green Party and sends me a verification of this (which I will double check so don’t try fakin it).

Authorised by Michael Pringle, 2A Zanda Terrance, Wellington.

Cool. I’m looking forward to pictures of cross stitch fish coming this way in the next week.

Meanwhile, here’s some of the entries we have had so far:

Random House, the publishers, introduce the book this way:

Will most of the major fisheries of the world be exhausted by 2048, as has been claimed? Have the number of large fish in the ocean decreased by 90 per cent over the past 50 years, as has been asserted by a respected scientist? Are 60 per cent of the fish species studied by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation either fully exploited or depleted, as one of their reports attests? Fishing at sea, an ancient trade and a way of life that has defined coastal towns throughout history, may be coming to an end. The culture and traditions of coastal Britain and of seagoing nations everywhere are now threatened with extinction.

To win a copy all you need to do is leave a comment below with a link to either a drawing of something fishy you’ve drawn here on this Queeky drawing site or a link to an online photo you have taken of something fishy.  We’ll get Metiria, the Greens’ fishiest MP, to judge the results.  One prize to the most artistic fishy picture and one spot prize for entering.

We’ll keep the competition open for a three weeks, until Aug 14.

Given the role Talley’s plays in the current state of our fisheries I imagine the advertising agency that designed this particular piece of greenwash would be washing their hands with bleach.

Talley’s is currently selling Monkfish on special:

As a sustainable resource, Monkfish allows our customers to benefit from an ongoing supply of this nutritious and delectable, high quality, seafood product.

Forest and Bird have a slightly different story to tell about the Monkfish. It rates Monkfish as one of the worst fish you can eat in terms of environmental impact. Currently we have no information available to let us know how many monkfish exist or where they are. Many Monkfish are caught by bottom trawling; a practice Talley’s boss, Andrew Talley has claimed is sustainable.

Talley’s doesn’t just catch monkfish. It is also the place to go if you want any of these fish listed as the worst choice of fish to catch in Forest and Bird‘s Fish Guide for 2007-2008: Hoki, Ling, Alfonsino, Hake, Oreo Dory, Flounder, Squid, Southern Blue Whiting, Orange Roughy and Warehou.

The expansion is occurring at the same time that sea surface temperatures are warming about one percent or .02 to .04 degrees Celsius a year. The warming increases stratification of the ocean waters, preventing deep ocean nutrients from rising to the surface and creating plantlife.

Hat tip: TreeHugger