Quota ‘blunders’ hit fishermen

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 26

Quota ‘blunders’ hit fishermen

PA Wellington Bureaucratic blunders meant orange roughy quotas for inshore fishing had to be reviewed in midseason, said the “Dominion” newspaper. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries had tripped on its own complicated system of allocating individual quotas for fishermen working inshore, said the newspaper. Many fishermen were denied the orange roughy they were entitled to catch since the season opened on October 1 and others had quotas in fishing grounds too deep for their boats to reach. The mistakes affected Wellington, Wairarapa, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Nelson, Greymouth and

Auckland-based fishermen.

Fisheries staff largely neglected to consider changes in the over-all limit for the species in many areas, the total allowable catch, when they drew up individual quotas for orange roughy in the inshore fishery, the "Dominion" said.

They tended to base calculation instead on each fisherman’s catch last season.

This meant many fishermen in areas with a larger total allowable catch this season were given individual quotas that were too low.

Even when they did bear in mind changes to the total allowable catch, Ministry staff made decisions that fishermen were

finding unworkable. Fishermen working off the Wairarapa coast, where the total allowable catch for orange roughy had been cut from 3000 tonnes to 1000 tonnes, had been allocated quotas in areas their boats were not big enough to fish.

These administrative errors emerged during the Ministry’s hearings to consider fishermen’s complaints about quota allocations.

The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Mr Moyle, set up a committee of three Ministry members and a Fishing Industry Board representative late last year to advise him on how to clean up the mess.

That committee is expected to suggest to Mr

Moyle that catch histories should play no part in the Ministry’s assessment of fishermen’s individual quotas for orange roughy in the inshore fishery.

It will also make a recommendation on alfonsino and bluenose allocations for the central management area, which is also posing problems for fishermen. The Executive Secretary of the Federation of Commercial Fishermen, Mr Peter Stevens, said the mistakes put fishermen’s livelihoods at risk.

“We just hope the Ministry in future can get it right first time,” Mr Stevens said.

“Many of our members are quite upset because these types of aberrations can cause considerable

trouble.”

The fact that Mr Moyle established a special committee to deal with the problem showed how significant the orginal blunder was.

However, the director of the Fisheries Management Division, Mr Brian Cunningham, put the errors down to failure of fishermen to provide the Ministry with adequate information on past catches. They either neglected to give the Ministry the necessary facts or their information was incorrect, Mr Cunningham said. A spokesperson for the review committee said that the proposed changes could be made within two weeks of Mr Moyle agreeing to the recommendations.