Commercial fishery going beyond sustainability for social well-being

Shifting the thinking of individual fishers from solo owner-operators to being part of commercial sector with shared obligations, responsibilities and social license and a common desire to promote better fishing practices to ensure the sustainability and growth of the snapper biomass. All independent commercial fishers, fishing vessel owners, SNA1 quota owners, Licensed Fish Receivers of snapper and snapper processing plants were identified and invited to attend the same meeting. Over a period of five months three meetings were held, repeated in four locations based on the commercial fishers ‘local port’. The first meeting identified the issues fishers felt they were being criticised about; the second meeting set out possible solutions and called for discussion before being voted on. At the third meeting the agreed solutions were framed as a Voluntary Agreement with six rules, debated and voted on before being given to government officials, who then worked with commercial fishers on the logistics of recording and reporting on success.

Fishers and vessel managers worked with fisheries scientists and innovative software technicians in collaboration with government officials to design an electronic observation tool that could be installed like lego building blocks on vessels as money becomes available or needs change. The tool meets multiple needs - fishers (safety), business (history of effort and catch), government (compliance), public (transparency). When the snapper fishers began to realise that video cameras could provide the transparency they sought, they went out to providers around the world and invited people to show their products. After off-the-shelf commercial offerings for Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS) and video monitoring (EM) were discounted because they didn’t have the required functionality (from a commercial perspective) or were too expensive, a decision was made to design and build a fully integrated suite of electronic monitors. Fishers wanted a system that used smart technology like automatic WIFI downloads, encrypted footage and ability for the viewer retrospectively to focus the camera on 3600 views.

After the first full year of data gathering, Trident Systems, the company that developed the observation tool, was asked to produce data sets based on the SNA1 Agreement including how many vessels moved on because they were catching undersized snapper and what volumes of small snapper were being caught by each fishing method. Specific information is confidential to each fisher, but an overall analysis is made public. This is the first time in New Zealand that inshore fin fishers can see the effect of their fishing practices on collective industry catching allocations. They start to recognize how they personally can contribute to sustainability of the snapper stock by changing their practices. New Zealand fisheries are data rich yet it is rarely used to build awareness and facilitate discussions between fishers to bring about change. Fishers involved in science projects are keener to understand the results of the work, are reviewing data and asking questions in a way that scientists are not used to. This review process is challenging and most often face-to-face. Scientists are reporting data to other scientists, but they are also bringing together fishers and providing advice and learnings on how to change fishing practices.

Networking and linking up with other organisations to support fishers’ initiatives.

Vessel Monitoring Systems (GPS) across the fleet Electronic Monitoring (EM) on the trawl fleet, designed and voluntary agreed to by fishers.