Trawling for the truth – why New Zealand’s main method of fishing is so controversial – Stuff.co.nz

On the back of a petition, the Government is weighing up further restrictions on bottom trawling in fragile, underwater eco-systems. But the fishing industry says calls to ban the controversial practice are based on misinformation. Andrea Vance reports.

Just after dawn, on a bitterly cold September morning, five activists and their skipper slipped out of Bluff Harbour in a rigid inflatable boat.

For four hours they huddled in the bow as the churning seas buffeted the pontoons and the Roaring Forties whipped around them.

Eventually, the rusted hull of an enormous trawler rose out of the grey gloom, the sign they had reached their destination. Fiordlands snow-capped mountains rose from the shore behind them.

The vessel was positioned over the Puysegur Bank, a ridge deep beneath the shifting waves, and a productive fishing ground.

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Shani Bennett/Stuff

A catch of mainly orange roughy caught in the Tasman Sea.

Film the Trawlers is a new project, begun by environmentalist Siana Fitzjohn, to document the activities of New Zealands commercial fishing fleet.

Top of mind is bottom trawling, a now controversial fishing practice where weighted nets are dragged along the sea floor, hauling some of our most popular fish: orange roughy, hoki and oreo.

The trawl doors disturb the sea bed, stirring up sediment which hides the net and generates a noise which attracts fish.

At first they swim in front of the net mouth, but as they tire they slip backwards into the net, finally falling exhausted into the tapered cod end.

For hours, the team watched, filmed and photographed as the San Discovery, a Sanford Limited trawler, worked. Also on board was Jasmine Black, who spent five years on Sealord trawlers.

Further south lies the Puysegur Benthic Protection Area, west of Stewart Island, where bottom trawling is restricted. In March Sanford Limited was ordered to forfeit a $20 million vessel, and fined $36,000 for illegally targeting orange roughy there in 2017 and 2018.

We're setting out to film the biggest and most destructive factory trawlers operating around Aotearoa, Canterbury-based Fitzjohn, 30, says. She has also campaigned for climate action group Extinction Rebellion.

Bottom trawling is out of sight and out of mind for most of us, because we can't see the nets scraping along the ocean floor picking up everything in their path. We want to meet the trawlers at sea and make these companies feel witnessed by the public.

Iain McGregor/Stuff

Siana Fitzjohn says her project aims to bear witness to industrial fishing practices.

The Puysegur Bank has multiple seamounts, ocean floor landforms which create an upwelling of nutrients. These attract marine species to feed, and for centuries have been known as good fishing sites.

But this ocean twilight zone is also home to delicate, slow-growing coral, and sea sponges, which are destroyed by the heavy fishing gear the doors that keep the nets open can weigh as much as 200kg.

New Zealand doesnt have the shallow, tropical reefs we often associate with coral. Its deepwater varieties provide habitat, sanctuary, and nursery areas for many other species.

These forests are often ancient samples of black coral taken from the Chatham Rise off the East Coast were estimated to be as old as 2,672 years. Bubblegum coral was aged between 300-500 years old.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF

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Seldom seen or explored by humans, these underwater mountains are the focus of growing political awareness about the environmental impacts of industrial fishing.

Bottom trawling was also implicated in the collapse of populations including orange roughy and hoki.

In 2015, Chile became the first nation in the world to permanently ban bottom trawling around seamounts within its exclusive economic zone (its ocean jurisdiction).

A year ago, the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of 90 NGOs, delivered a petition to Parliament, calling for a ban on bottom trawling on seamounts in New Zealands waters.

They argue little or no bottom trawling occurs on seamounts in the high seas in other oceans.

Iain McGregor/Stuff

Eugenie Sage is chair of a select committee deliberating over a ban on trawling seamounts.

The Environment Select Committee is considering the petition, signed by 52,000. It is chaired by MP Eugenie Sage, whos Green Party has gone even further, pushing for a total ban across New Zealands four million square kilometres of ocean.

Separately from the select committee process, Oceans and Fisheries Minister David has confirmed to Stuff that officials are working on new measures.

We are taking steps to review whether the current management settings relating to bottom trawling on seamounts and seamount-like features need to be amended, he said.

Fisheries New Zealand is working with the Department of Conservation to establish a forum to discuss approaches to managing the effects of trawling on the benthic environment in New Zealands Exclusive Economic Zone.

He said it is hoped the forums work would begin early next year.

The forums discussions will be supported by use of a spatial decision support tool that incorporates the best available information on the distribution of benthic species, fishing activities, and seamounts and seamount-like features.

In the last week Greenpeace presented a new, 60-page report to the select committee, which details the extent of rare, endemic species of coral found on seamounts, and how the depths that they live in overlap with commercial trawling.

It shows is that some of the rarest, unique corals found in Aotearoa are vastly unprotected from destructive fishing, oceans campaigner Ellie Hooper said.

The places where these corals live are the depths bottom trawlers operate at, and that the majority of seamounts in New Zealand are unprotected from this fishing method.

The report details how 196 endemic coral species, some of which are listed as protected by the Department of Conservation are vulnerable, because trawling is permitted in their habitat.

Protection doesnt mean anything in this case. Commercial fishing companies are permitted to destroy an unlimited amount of them, dragging heavy, weighted nets right through where they live, she said.

The latest report from DOC indicates seven tonnes of protected coral was dragged up by trawlers in last years fishing season alone.

Descend NZ/Matt Green

Black coral is among the fragile species at risk from bottom trawling.

Fisheries New Zealand data shows that in the 11 years between 2007 and 2018, 21 per cent of the fishable area within New Zealands waters was bottom-trawled.

And Greenpeace fears fleets are expanding into new unfished areas: in the 2017/18 fishing season, 455 square kilometres were trawled for the first time.

The DSCC also argues that New Zealand is now the only country bottom trawling every year in the South Pacific. As of April 2021, the government has issued permits to six trawl vessels belonging to four companies to fish in international waters of the South Pacific.

And the coalition points to recent convictions for illegal fishing in closed areas. Only one of the six New Zealand bottom trawl vessels currently permitted to trawl in the South Pacific belongs to a company that hasnt been convicted in the past year of illegal fishing in closed areas, the coalitions evidence to select committee states.

Nick Tapp/Greenpeace

Representatives from seven environmental groups presented a petition to ban bottom trawling on a giant model of paragorgia (bubblegum) coral outside Parliament in November 2020.

However, the $4.18 billion fishing industry is strongly urging the Government to reject the petition. It estimates 90 per cent of the catch, for both inshore and deep sea fisheries, comes from bottom trawling.

Collin Williams is Sanfords general manager of fishing, and has almost four decades in the sector, including a decade in compliance at the then-Ministry of Fisheries.

Close to 94 per cent of the companys catch is bottom-trawled. And there is no alternative to net the type of fish in demand from consumers, the ingredients in our freezer favourites like fish fingers.

The species that we bottom trawl are demersal fish, they're literally on the bottom. Things like orange roughy, hoki, you don't catch them with long lines.

We catch it by the most efficient and economical, and viable method to catch the volumes that we need to catch.

Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

A graphic from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition illustrating what bottom trawling is.

Williams argues only 3.5 per cent, or 122,000sq km of the EEZ is subject to bottom trawling operations.

Since 2006, bottom trawling has been banned in a third of New Zealand's waters (although a large percentage of these areas were never viable for the method in the first place).

Williams says vessels furrow repeatedly over the same narrow tracks they wouldnt plunder an entire seamount.

A trawl corridor or trawl lane down a feature like that is a very narrow sector. We go to the same place, for very good reasons. We are not in the business of harvesting coral, we are in the business of harvesting fish.

As a result, much of what is hauled up is dead rubble, not live coral.

And he contends it has environmental benefits. Fish is one of the most carbon friendly, sustainable, sources of protein in the world. So it's a real positive food contributor for arguably the least damage to any terrestrial or subterranean.

One overseas study claims trawling releases more carbon in a year than the pre-Covid global aviation industry, but the industry strongly disputes its findings.

The sector, represented at the select committee by the Deepwater Group, also takes issue with conservationists definition of a seamount.

Greenpeaces report, and the evidence submitted by DSCC, describes a seamount as an underwater feature standing over 100m, and as such there are 800 in New Zealand. It is a classification used by DOC and many NIWA scientists.

However, the Deepwater group argues the internationally accepted definition of a seamount, as understood by the International Oceanographic Commission, the International Hydrographic Organisation and the New Zealand Geographic Board, is a feature with an elevation of more than 1,000 metres.

Under that definition, there are 142 known seamounts within the EEZ, 89 per cent of which are either closed to trawling or have never been trawled.

The group further claims trawling has only occurred on 9 (or six per cent) of seamounts over the past decade.

Hooper says the industry is arguing semantics. We know coral is growing in these areas.

Getting into what we define as a seamount is a pointless argument it is about the depth from the surface which determines whether these corals are going to grow there.

There are a large number of people in New Zealand now who support restricting bottom trawling. They see it as important to protect native biodiversity and the ocean, which we know is struggling. What is missing is the political will to rein in the industry and protect the environment.

Stuff

The fishing industry and conservationists are in dispute about the extent of trawling on seamounts.

Doug Paulin, Sealords chief executive says the fishing industry is tightly regulated to ensure a balance between conserving biodiversity while still providing jobs and food security.

Sealord, as the countrys largest deep sea fishing company, is always interested in pushing to do more, and we have several future based action plans that we are currently developing, he said.

We are also open to discussion with the Government, the public and eNGOs [environmental non-governmental organisations] on whether or not further management measures might be required.

We need to sit down and talk and ask, what is a viable place we can get to where we can assure that conservation is absolutely maintained at a world-leading status and that food production can still occur in New Zealands EEZ, including bottom trawling.

While politicians and the industry mull over policy, Fitzjohn is planning her next mission, pouring over maps and marine traffic data.

We hope that by filming as many trawlers in as many locations as possible over the next few years, we'll be able to help connect the public to the different habitats and species under siege, and get people on board with the kind of protection measures that the ocean so desperately needs, she says.

Unless we start to connect with the industrial scale of damage being done at sea, we'll destroy a lot of the precious ecology around these islands without even knowing what was there in the first place.

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Trawling for the truth - why New Zealand's main method of fishing is so controversial - Stuff.co.nz