Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy has signaled the New Zealand Government’s intention to speed up the rollout of monitoring equipment on commercial fishing vessels.
“Work is already underway on installing electronic monitoring and cameras on all commercial fishing vessels, however today I’ve signaled to my officials that this work should be fast-tracked,” said Guy.
“This increased monitoring will provide greater transparency of the commercial fleet’s activities and improve public confidence that our fisheries are being well managed.
“Officials will prepare advice for me on how we can implement this faster. This work will feed into the operational review of our fisheries management system that I announced last year.
“While the fundamentals of our QMS are sound, the operational review will ensure our fishing system is up to date and working as fairly and efficiently as it can. Possible options include changes to fisheries management processes within the current legislation, regulatory change, and amendments to the Fisheries Act,” said Guy.
The government will release a public discussion document on any proposed changes to its fisheries management system later this year.
“Earlier in the year I announced that we had achieved 100 percent camera coverage of the Snapper 1 trawl fleet, and vessel monitoring systems are in place on 55 vessels operating in the SNA1 fishery.
“Coverage of observers on vessels has doubled over the past decade, and there were over 10,000 observer days recorded at sea last year.”
New Zealand’s seafood exports totaled NZD 1.7 billion (USD 1.2 billion, EUR 1 billion) for the 12 months through to the end of March 2016. This represented an 11.4 percent increase on the previous year and an NZD 80 million (USD 54.7 million, EUR 47.9 million) increase on the previous high of NZD 1.6 billion (USD 1.1 billion, EUR 957.5 million) for the 2015 calendar year. The strongest value growth was from exports of frozen finfish with rock lobster, orange roughy, fishmeal and mussels also returning increased prices.
