Bad fisheries management is not limited to Europe

– Independent scientist blasts Australian system

A browse through the websites and publications of the various state and commonwealth bodies involved in Australian fisheries reveals numerous claims to excellence and even assertions of being the "world's best" in fisheries management. Last year the managing director of the Australian Fish Management Authority (AFMA) described its management as "actually leading the world in this stuff" and "It is cutting edge."

Statistics present a somewhat different picture. Australia, with the third largest fishery zone in the world and the largest by far per capita, has the lowest harvest rate at only 3% of the global average.

The management is also the most expensive and restrictive in the world. Every year increasing management costs are delivering further decreases in production, participation and profitability while managers bask in self-awarded accolades. In a number of smaller fisheries, management costs more than the GDP of the fishery. Money could be saved by paying the fishermen not to fish and dispensing with management! Over two-thirds of domestic seafood consumption comes from imports. All of these are from far more heavily impacted resources elsewhere. That this could be seen as unconscionable seems not to be recognised. In addition to their impacts elsewhere, these imports cost some $1.7 billion annually and the price is steeply increasing. They are paid for by selling off non-renewable resources. Yet this is called "sustainable management".

Despite all this management, Australian fisheries are in widespread serious decline. However, in no instance does this involve a collapse of catches due to overfishing. In every case overregulation is a major factor in making economic operation impossible. The budget for AFMA – which manages the offshore fisheries – comes to over $100,000 per vessel. State fisheries departments spend only moderately less per vessel. Western Australia has the largest state fishery. It manages a fleet of some 1100 vessels for a department budget of $65m. In both cases the biggest vessels are small by world standards and most are very small by any standard. If the EEZ area and catch of Australia is compared with that of other nations in the region, it is apparent that the Australian fishing zone is the largest and the catch the smallest.

Until a few years ago low productivity was not even mentioned. It became a convenient explanation only after I brought up in public debate that claims of widespread threats from overfishing were grossly inconsistent with a harvest rate that is only 3% of the global average and less than half of 1% that of Thailand, Australia's biggest supplier of imports.

Suddenly, an inexplicable black hole in oceanic productivity was proclaimed and the Commonwealth Minister announced that "Australia is in the middle of, you might say, a fish desert". Strangely, oceanographic science seems never before to have noted this remarkable phenomenon until it was needed to explain dubious claims of overfishing despite only tiny harvest rates. I then pointed out that global marine primary productivity measurements from satellite monitoring showed no unusually low productivity around Australia. The first response to this was a claim that the most productive fisheries are on the continental shelves and we had only a small shelf area. This really wasn’t very well considered.

Australia has the second largest shelf area of any nation. The shelf area nonsense was quickly shelved and the claim then became that the productivity figures were only averages and a large area of exceptionally high productivity in the north meant that productivity in most of Australia's waters was very low.

This ignored the fact that productivity everywhere varies widely with time and place, and Australia’s is not in any way unusual in this respect. It also raised a further question regarding the absence of major fisheries associated with the area of highest productivity.

If, indeed, Australia's waters were so poor it would be obvious to any fisherman with experience elsewhere and would be reflected in a very low catch per unit of effort. To the contrary, above average abundance is clearly apparent. To believe the management codswallop one must accept that, despite being almost non-existent compared to anywhere else, Australia’s fish somehow conspire to be caught at rates higher than where they are 30 or even 200 times more abundant. Anyone who can believe this may find a bright future in Australian fisheries management!

Call for help

In April 2008 I received a phone call from a fisherman in Broome. He has one of six boats engaged in a small but valuable deepwater trap fishery that was facing extinction from increasing management restrictions. As they are the only offshore fishery in the huge Kimberley region of north-west Australia and in the heart of some of Australia’s most productive waters, their situation was of particular interest.

I agreed to help in their struggle. What subsequently unfolded is an unequivocal example of the profound disconnection of management from the reality of actual resource.

It turned out that the fishery is limited to a total of 11 licences, each permitting the equivalent of 20 traps per day for an allocated number of fishing days each year. These licences are currently fished by six vessels. Catches have remained excellent over the 18 years since the fishery began and the catch per unit of effort has had an upward trend. However, management has continually claimed evidence of overfishing and the number of annual fishing days has been steadily reduced from unlimited in the early years to 104 days in the main fishing zone in 2008, with a further 30% reduction planned for 2009. At this level financial viability would be problematic and retention of crew impossible.

What I found would beggar belief were it not true. The fishing grounds involved are fished solely by the six vessels of the Northern Demersal Scalefish Fishery. These grounds comprise over 200,000sq km of Australia’s extensive north-west shelf. Widespread fishing has produced excellent catches throughout the area. Each of the small vessels in the fishery effectively has over 30,000sq km. of rich grounds all to itself. Allowing for an overly generous catching radius of 30m for each trap, the total annual effort of the fishery only fishes 00.2% of the 90,000sq km of the B Zone, where most of the fishing is conducted.

At the present rate of exploitation it would take some 500 years to fish it completely just one time and over 1000 years to fish both the A and B Zones. On top of this are two additional large inshore and offshore zones that are not being fished at all.

Fishing one time means one trap set of a few hours within a 30m radius or about three quarters of an acre. In addition, video camera observations of the traps show that a trap catches only a small portion of the fish immediately around it. Somehow, using a concoction of estimates, assumptions and theories plugged into a computer model, the managers have come up with what they claim is evidence of overfishing.

Fundamental to their claim are estimates of total biomass for the entire fishery and its principle species. These, if distributed over the area of the B Zone alone, are 30 to 100 times less than what the traps are actually catching. It seems that the utterly impossible is not even questioned if it supports a notion of overfishing.

The real world evidence from a remarkably consistent 18 years of standardised sampling of around one million trap sets has been ignored in favour of an estimate based on a dubious confection of compounded uncertainties. This is then employed for management by remote control as practised by office workers 1000 miles away who in 18 years have never even seen the fishery.

Duty to exploit stocks

The implications of this situation go well beyond just an academic dispute or the livelihood of a half-dozen fishermen in Broome. Under the International Law of the Sea Treaty on which Australian EEZ rights to the north-west shelf fisheries are based, exclusivity requires usage.

Large Asian fishing companies are well aware of the rich and virtually untouched fishing grounds off northern Australia and I have been told by the chief executive officer of one such company that a legal challenge before the World Court for access is being considered. Present management would make this very real possibility most difficult to defend.

The management of the Broome trap fishery repeated 100-fold around the country is what is wrong in Australian fisheries management. It is simply a fantasy that is not even credible at first glance if it is accorded the most rudimentary quantitative examination. Current management emphasises protection, precaution and sustainability; but, in itself, this is a no-brainer. To achieve these aims, all that is required are high levels of restriction.

Good management, however, must also entail productive utilisation of resources and maximising their socio-economic value, not just locking them up to"protect" them. Claims of excellent management are bolstered by assertions that it's all based on "sound science". Mostly, this scientific charade consists of "expert" opinions, computer models and a liberal dose of important sounding techno-waffle devoid of any clear meaning. Although terms such as 'sustainability’, "biodiversity", 'ecosystem-based management’, 'ecologically sustainable development’, 'computer models’, 'precautionary’, 'overfishing’, 'threatened’ and 'endangered’ all do have technical definitions, they have also become ill-defined colloquialised terms of emotional index. This ambiguity provides an aura of scientific sophistication along with an element of emotive appeal. This style of eco-speak, bureau-blather and techno-gibberish sounds impressive, means little and misleads without outright lying.

Just before the recent election in Australia, the new prime minister-to-be announced he would take a “meat axe" to the bloated bureaucracy if he won office. Australia’s environmental management agencies, and in particular marine management, deserve to be near the top of the list for such attention. Even if Australia’s tiny catch were indeed all its waters could sustain, the ongoing trend of spending more and more on management where the resulting production and profitability become less and less is the antithesis of the fundamental purpose of management. Making bureaucratic budgets and authority subject to outcomes would yield a quantum improvement in governance. If this could be effected, it really would be a “cutting edge" achievement.

'Enough is enough'

Fishery managers and environmentalists are out of touch with reality argues independent scientist. In the past, maximum sustained yield (MSY) was the ideal and monitoring the performance of a fishery was the primary methodology of management. Now we have a new generation of biologists schooled in theories and enthralled by sophisticated computer models based on simplistic assumptions about complex and highly variable phenomena about which we genuinely understand very little.

Although such models may be of value in gaining insights about the possible dynamics of a resource, their output is fraught with many uncertainties. Typically they require generous tweaking to yield results that are within the bounds of credibility – and they tend to reflect more the assumptions, aims and adjustments of the modeller than anything in reality.

On top of all this has come the rise of environmentalism and a growing attitude that primary producers are exploiters who need to be severely curtailed if not stopped altogether. No matter how sound the supporting evidence, any suggestion that an environmental problem may not be as dire as feared receives only angry rejection from environmentalists, never hopeful interest. Their commitment is to the problem, not a balanced solution, and the stake-holding they so righteously claim is one assumed with no investment.

To many urbanites the environment has acquired a near sacred status. Though themselves voracious consumers, they are divorced from the production that supplies their demands. Those who supply them are seen as greedy exploiters and defilers of the sacred. Even more ironically, their own chosen lifestyle is one which has virtually annihilated the natural world in the environment in which they choose to live.

The reality of a constant struggle for survival in a dynamic ever-changing world has been replaced by a romantic notion of nature in a blissful state of harmony and balance: something pure and perfect where any detectable human influence is by definition a desecration. This sacred perspective of the environment manifests itself in language where 'fragile’ and 'delicate’ become almost mandatory adjectives in describing the natural world. A peculiar corollary of all this has been the enshrinement of the precautionary principle as mandating that any imagined possibility of an environmental effect must be addressed with full measures to prevent it.

Unfortunately this formulation makes no reference to probability, cost, or consequences of risks and it offers a ready cloak for sundry other agendas. Amazingly, this vacuous and pernicious piece of nonsense has even been written into the enabling legislation for the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.

Management of our fisheries has become divorced from the realities of the industry, the real nature of the resource and any factual consideration of its condition and dynamics. Fishing is a demanding and uncertain, often even dangerous, business. The ability to bear added costs and restrictions is not unlimited they should only be imposed with due care. The marine communities upon which fisheries are based are not fragile and delicate, but rather robust and flexible ones that readily undergo and recover from frequent natural perturbations.

There is little risk in monitoring fisheries and addressing problems if and when they become apparent, rather than trying to take elaborate pre-emptive action to avoid an endless array of imaginary possibilities. No species of marine fish or invertebrate has ever been exterminated by fishing. In general a much more empirically based approach is needed. Management decisions should be based on what is actually happening in a fishery, not theories and models.

Test measures first

In view of our ignorance and the complexity of the matters involved, it would also be prudent to test measures before applying them on a broad scale and to carefully assess their results when implemented. Restrictions should be imposed only where a demonstrated need exists and results should be monitored. Much stronger involvement of the industry in formulating management measures is essential to ensure that the form of demands is appropriate to the practical realities of the fishery. Remote control management by theory without broad and ongoing assessment of actual conditions and results is a recipe only for continuing decline.

On top of growing demands and restrictions, large areas where fishing is totally prohibited are rapidly increasing. Australia now has about one-third of the total Marine Protected Area in the world. When planned additions are completed it will have near half and – if the proposed Coral Sea area is implemented – it will be closer to two-thirds. This is insanely excessive, especially when Australia is probably the only nation where no problem exists in the first place. At the same time as government has been diligently closing down our fisheries, it has been budgeting millions of dollars to encourage higher consumption of seafood for its health benefits.

Over the past few years a number of large scale studies published in leading medical journals have reported a variety of important health benefits associated with seafood. The bottom line is that high levels of seafood consumption correlate directly with happier, healthier, longer lives. They could also be expected to provide the additional benefit of a significant reduction in the massive cost of health care.

Ecology is above all holistic. Every organism must have effects in order to exist. We are no exception. Aiming to maximise our beneficial effects and minimise our detrimental ones requires trade-offs and balances whereby we seek to spread our impacts across our whole resource base within the bounds of sustainability.

Every resource we lock up puts more pressure on others and makes balance more difficult. An unnecessary restriction in one place becomes an increased impact somewhere else.

We now face a global financial crisis, a looming energy supply crunch and emerging food supply problems. Continuing to add further ill-founded restrictions on our producers is tantamount to treason in a time of war. It is time that positive results are demanded from management, not just waffle. It is also time that real evidence is demanded of researchers, not just unsupported opinions by a chorus of 'experts’ singing for their supper. Above all, it is past time for the public to realise that we are all paying the price of resource mismanagement in our health, in the cost of living and in the general well being of the nation.

Lumbering government will awaken only when an angry electorate begins to loudly shout: “Enough is enough!"

Dr Walter Starck

DR WALTER STARCK grew up on an island in the Florida Keys and began catching fish in saleable quantities off the family dock at age five. At six he helped his grandfather build his first boat with which he began diving using a face mask. He started scuba diving in 1954 (before scuba was a word). In 1964 he completed a PhD at the Institute of Marine Science of the University of Miami. In the process he determined that the world of academia was not to his taste, so he started his own business as well as a private research foundation. In 1968 he took delivery of the purpose-built 150 ton research vessel El Torito and spent the next two decades exploring widely from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific.

He arrived in Australia in 1979. His research interest has centered on coral reef biology and has included research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and National Geographic Society, as well as various private foundations and individuals. He has been a research associate of the Institute of Marine Science in Miami, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, The Australian Museum in Sydney and the Western Australia Museum in Perth.

His wide experience of reefs around the world has encompassed the full spectrum of conditions ranging from heavily impacted to untouched, as well as several opportunities for decade or longer familiarity with individual reefs. His views on reef biology derived from direct observation are not always in accord with popular theories. From 1989 to 2008 William Starck has been writing, speaking and consulting on marine resource management issues.

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