http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/09/09/3003951.htm



Survival of the fishes

Overfishing is a problem in Australia, but we've come a long way in recent years in terms of fishing sustainability, say scientists and environmentalists.

By Stephen Pincock

Paul Bagnato sits in the wheelhouse of his blue-trimmed fishing boat, the Arakiwa, leafing through the log books he fills in each time he and his crew take their vessel out to trawl for whiting, flathead, mirror dory and other fish in the oceans off the NSW coast.

The boat is currently tied up at the Sydney Fish Markets wharf, but the logs tell stories of the 36-hour trawling trips they make twice a week, up to 30 kilometres offshore, with each entry in the well-worn books recording the size of each catch, when it was brought up, and what species were in the nets.

Bagnato has been fishing the NSW coast for 37 years. He is proud of the fact that his boat is among the multitudes around the world that bring in the estimated 140 million tonnes of seafood we eat each year. That's 16.7 kilograms of fish for every person on the planet, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates. In fact, fish accounts for 15 per cent of many people's yearly protein intake.

But in recent decades, there has been growing concern about the severe damage being done to fish populations and wider marine ecosystems by overfishing and other destructive fishing methods. Overfishing of iconic species like bluefin tuna from the Pacific Ocean, or cod in northern oceans, has become a rallying call for scientists and environmental groups worldwide.

Bagnato has certainly heard about those problems, but he says the situation in Australia — where governments apply quotas and restrict where individual boats can fish, and where most fishers respect those rules — is a different kettle of fish, so to speak.

"We know what's going on," he says. "We want to make sure there are enough fish for us to fish another day. It's in our interest."

Bagnato is not alone. Scientists, government bodies and environmentalists say that although Australia still has problems, it has come a long way in recent years in terms of fishing sustainability.

Overfished and overfishing — a measure of sustainability When scientists say a fish stock — a species of fish in a designated fishing zone — is overfished, they mean the amount of fish being removed exceeds the stock's ability to replenish itself in that fishing zone. This can happen if an adult population is harvested to the point where there are not enough adults to spawn and produce offspring. Some species of deep sea fish, such as the orange roughy, are highly vulnerable because they don't mature until they are between 25 and 35 years old.

Overfishing means the fish are subject to a level of fishing that will move it to an overfished state, or will prevent it from returning to a not-overfished state.

^ to top
Global crisis

Most of the seafood eaten in Australia is imported from countries such as Vietnam and Thailand. (Source: Nguyen Huy Kham/Reuters)

In the second half of last century, the world's booming population combined with industrialised fishing techniques and a growing appetite for fish, dramatically depleted many fish stocks around the world.

Poor management and illegal fishing, combined with pollution and other environmental problems pushed some marine ecosystems to the edge, scientists say.

"About 63 per cent of all known fish stocks are overfished around the world," says Dr Beth Fulton, a CSIRO scientist whose work focuses on modelling the sustainability of fishing.

"There are places that are in a really bad way," agrees Professor Bob Kearney, Emeritus Professor in Fisheries Management at the University of Canberra. Some developing countries face major problems, he says, and not only from their own fishing fleets.

"The foreign fleets — I hate to use the expression — almost raped and pillaged West Africa and other places."

Until 20 years ago, "the world still treated fish as being a resource that you could not over-exploit, so there really wasn't a serious attempt to manage fisheries, and that was true even in Australia," Kearney says.

At the same time, advances in fishing technology, from enormous factory boats to 'fish attracting devices' and global positioning systems, allowed fishers to catch more fish, more efficiently.

In the 1990s, governments and international bodies like the United Nations woke up to the fact that this situation could not continue and tried to establish processes to ensure fishing was sustainable. In 1995, to take one of many examples, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization developed a voluntary Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries.

"Where there is good governance, fisheries tend to be in relatively good shape and recovering," says Kearney.

Unfortunately, compliance with the UN code is "dismayingly poor" researchers said in the journal Nature last February . Of the world's 53 top fishing countries, 28 countries (including Thailand and Vietnam which supply a lot of the fish consumed by Austrailans), scored a "fail" by the researchers.

And in July last year, an international team of researchers reported that although the world's fisheries were tending to become more sustainable than they were a decade or two ago, many of the world's fish stocks still needed rebuilding.

"Even lower exploitation rates are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species," they warned.

^ to top
Sustainable down under?

Covering some nine million square kilometres, Australia's fishing zone is the third largest in the world, after France and the USA.

From the Great Barrier Reef to sub-Antarctic islands, these waters are home to an incredible assortment of life. In July, CSIRO researchers estimated that there could be as many as 250,000 species of plants and animals, known and yet to be discovered, in Australia's waters.

The list of known species includes around 5000 types of fish. "That's known, named species that are recorded in the databases; there are bound to be more out there," says one of the authors, Dr Alan Butler from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research.

Despite this diversity, most of Australia's waters are relatively low in nutrients, meaning there are actually fewer fish there than in other countries. Reflecting this, our overall fish catch ranks just 46th in the world. We actually import more than half the seafood we eat, mostly from Thailand, New Zealand, Vietnam and China.

The job of managing fishing in Australian waters is split between the Federal and State governments. Broadly speaking, the states deal with fisheries up to three nautical miles from shore, where the bulk of the catch comes from. The Federal government handles the remainder of the fishing zone, which extends out to 200 nautical miles.

For most of our history, as Kearney says, sustainability was not exactly the top priority of those management schemes. "When I came back to Australia in 1986 and took the job as director of research for New South Wales Fisheries, it was New South Wales Government policy that it was impossible to over-exploit any species of fish and if you fished them down a bit, then people would just move on and fish the next species."

But the government, scientists, and the fishing industry say that things have improved in recent years. In 2005, for example, the Federal government announced a $220 million package that aimed to reduce overfishing through buying back fishing licences. Concern about overfishing was also a factor in the decision by governments to establish marine protected areas where fishing was banned.


Both marine parks and well-managed fisheries are essential to ensure sustainable fish stocks, say the Australian Marine Sciences Association, a group of 900 Australian marine scientists.

Kearney, on the other hand, believes marine protected areas do nothing to improve fishing sustainability, but he says a combination of tighter quotas and reducing fishing effort have made a difference.

"We realised that we had to cut back on the amount of fish being caught and killed and have done that," he says.

Fulton says that overfishing in Australia, particularly in the Commonwealth fisheries has "largely stopped".

"The government said: 'Right we are going to reduce the pressure on the fish to let them recover to sustainable levels for the future'," she explains. "So we have a bad report card right now with regard to the health of the stock, but it is actually improving."

According to the Australian government's latest fishery status report the number of fish stocks that have been assessed as not overfished has more than doubled since 2004, and the number of stocks classified as not subject to overfishing has risen from 12 to 57 in that time.

The report currently classifies 13 of Australia's 98 fish stocks as being overfished (see list below), including three new additions: blue warehou, upper-slope gulper sharks and jackass morwong. Eight stocks are classified as being subject to overfishing.

There are also a large number of stocks that are classified as uncertain.

"The high proportion of stocks that remain classified as uncertain (approximately 42 per cent for overfished status and 32 per cent for overfishing status) is a continuing cause for concern and highlights the importance of applying the precautionary approach in fisheries management," the report states.

^ to top
More to do

Ben Birt, marine campaigner with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, agrees that since the 1990s there have been improvements in scientific knowledge, and improvements in fisheries management.

But he says there is more still to do. "What we also need to ask is whether we've learned from past mistakes, and to answer that you need to look at fish stocks," he says.

"There are still overfished stocks in every state, and in the Commonwealth fisheries almost one in five stocks is overfished or subject to overfishing. There are still fisheries that throw back more dead catch than they keep, and there are is still significant fishing pressure on species for which we have no stock assessments."

He raises particular concerns about Australia's contribution to the world shark-fin trade "even though stock assessments don't exist for most shark species and it is widely known that sharks are inherently vulnerable to fishing pressure."

"We still catch juvenile bluefin tuna, not giving them a chance to breed even though the population is down at around 5 per cent of what it once was," he says.

Looking from the outside, experts say Australian fisheries are taking some important steps to ensure sustainability.

Tony Pitcher, a well-known fisheries scientist from the University of British Columbia in Canada says Australia has invested considerable effort in "reducing bycatch, in seriously trying to implement ecosystem-based management, and in tackling 'code of conduct' issues in legislation."

But he also notes that our fisheries suffer from large volumes of marine life caught but discarded, especially in the prawn fisheries, and considerable unreported fishing.

For Paul Bagnato, whose father was a fisher before him, the sustainability of fisheries in Australia, and the perception of fishers in general, is a personal matter. Putting his catch logs back on a shelf in the Arakiwa's cabin, he turns and looks me in the eye.

"People look at us as if we go out fishing and catch what we want," he says. "There's a real misconception about what we do. We aren't selfish. We're responsible. We're food providers."