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Kahawai
Letter to NZ Fishing News
January
2005
Mark Feldman M.D.
Northland
Dear
Grant
I
sent my contribution into the Kahawai Legal Challenge today. But
I wasn't happy about it, not happy at all. We already pay to run
the Ministry of Fisheries; they're supposed to protect our fish.
Now we have to pay twice, once to the taxman to fund the Ministry
and now to the lawyers, to protect our fish from the Ministry!
But
what choice do we have? The Ministry and its policies have been
a disaster from the bottom up. The very principle that there's an
easily determined maximum sustainable yield that can be applied
with accuracy is ridiculous. The number of fish you need to maintain
any given fishery depends on so many constantly varying unknowns
like weather, food supply, dumping, predation, disease, pollution,
wastage, etc that there's no way to calculate it. This uncertainty
is compounded by the crazy policy of “knife-edge management” where
the Ministry pretends it knows what it's doing and can calculate
to the nearest fish how many we can take without courting disaster.
Then
there's the problem of measuring the number of fish in the water.
That's been shown, by an endless series of errors worldwide, to
be just about impossible. Despite the fact they have failed over
and over again (with hoki just recently) these policies are maintained
because of the mindless pressure for more fish from the commercial
sector. This pressure, which is well funded and unrelenting, profoundly
alters all levels of the scientific and political process and is
further complicated by the incestuous relationships between industry
and Ministry, with employees moving between them as if it was one
business and taking their bias with them (as publicised by the scampi
fiasco).
Despite
all of these difficulties and a long list of grave management errors,
there is still an unbelievable corporate arrogance. Which explains
why the Ministry went ahead and allocated over 3000 tonnes of kahawai
to the commercial sector despite the fact they knew absolutely nothing
about the fish except there are tens of thousands of recreational
fishers telling them the kahawai are disappearing.
It's a
sad, sad tale and, after fifteen years, I have grown tired of attending
mindless meetings and writing about it. It's easier to just pay the
lawyers.
Sincerely,
Mark Feldman M.D
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