Joint fishing ‘not bogy’

Press, 30 May 1981, Page 22

Joint fishing ‘not bogy’

PA Wellington Joint-venture fishing operators were far from being bogymen who ex-.. plotted New Zealand’s fishing resources, an industry leaderhas said. “It is unfortunate that some people are still under the wrong impression about joint-venture operations.” said the president of the Seafood Processors and Exporters’ Association, Mr H. W. Rademaker. He was replying to a statement by the Labour spokesman on primary industries, Sir Basil Arthur, who said he knew of only one joint-ven-ture which contained a significant amount of New Zealand participation. “Every New Zealander in the industry would prefer that our total resource was used by our own domestic industry,” Mr Rademaker said. “But the domestic industry has not yet got the capacity to do this. “Under the Law of the Sea, New Zealand has the first right to the resources in its 200-mile economic zone, but what we do not or cannot harvest ourselves we have to make available to foreign countries. “Joint ventures have been introduced to increase the New Zealand involvement in our zone and to reduce the quantity that would otherwise have to be allocated to foreign-licensed vessels.” Mr Rademaker said that as a result of this policy, 75

per cent of the total catch in 1980 was caught by the domestic and joint-venture sections of the industry, and only 25 per cent by foreignlicensed vessels. "The joint-venture returns are. of course, less than the proceeds of catches by the domestic fleet,” he said. “But over all these returns are still considerably larger than the fees we would have received if the fish were caught by foreign-licensed vessels. “To a large extent this is due to the quantity of jointventure fish that is processed by New Zealand factories.” Other advantages that Mr Rademaker saw from the joint-venture operations were technical advances in the catching and processing sides of the industry, access to markets and marketing experience, and the “extra product” for the factories to supplement supplies from the domestic fleet. The extra fish for processing made the operation of the processing plants more profitable and indirectly helped the domestic catching sector as well, he said. “In the long term we hope that the total resources can be harvested by a 100 per cent domestic fleet,” he said. “But in the meantime the industry and the country obtain more benefit out of the joint-venture, involvement than they would by licensing out to foreign vessels.”