Fishermen want compensation

Press, 17 August 1984, Page 20

Fishermen want compensation

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

Fishermen support a voluntary compensation scheme that will either allow them to leave the inshore fishing industry with dignity or transfer to new or offshore fisheries.

This is the chief recommendation to the National Fisheries Management Advisory Committee from fishermen on future policy for the inshore fishery. The committee has passed this and other recommendations on to the Minister of Fisheries, Mr Moyle. He said that in releasing the committee’s report he was not necessarily endorsing the recommendations in it The Government had not had a chance to consider the proposals or recommendations it contained.

However, the proposals and recommendations would be examined by his officials, who had been told to report back to the Government as a matter of top priority. The fishermen told the committee that the moratorium should have covered

the issue of all domestic permits and not just the 12mile fishery, and had not been enforced as stringently as it should have been.

Fishermen generally did not welcome efforts to control fishing on their own, but recognised their value as part of a long-term strategy of fisheries management planning. Their experience with controlled fisheries had led fishermen to believe that controlled fisheries '■should be precluded as a means of reducing fishing in either the short term or the long term.

There was universal supKrt among fishermen for a ig-term management framework. Three concepts were vital to this:

• Management of single or multi-species fisheries within defined limits.

• Industry involvement, through a network of liaison committees in the development and maintenance of plans. • Acknowledgement of biological, environmental, economic and social parameters in planning. Throughout the country,

fishermen expressed interest in individual transferrable quotas within the framework of a fisheries management plan, to be introduced in the long term.

Mr Moyle said the report had been prepared for the Minister of Fisheries in the E' us Government, Mr tyre, but had not been released.

It was being released now because of the widespread concern in the fishing industry and the community about the problems facing the inshore fishery. The report recommended that the Government consider a range of short-term, and long-term policy options that could be used to address the industry’s problems.

“An over-fishing and over-capitalisation problem of some magnitude exists in the inshore fishery,” the committee said. “Action is needed urgently to resolve the shortterm resource problems and longer-term policies are essential if a recurrence of the present problem is to be avoided.”