| Mark
Feldman M.D.
Kerikeri
Northland
March 3rd, 2004
Dear Prime Minister
I would like to draw your attention to a problem at the Ministry
of Fisheries before it becomes a public relations disaster that
you don’t need right now.
Kahawai, the “people’s fish” are due to come into
the Quota Management System this October. After years of mismanagement,
MFish wants to continue with the status quo, declaring that the
fishery is stable. MFish has no grounds for declaring the fishery
stable and there’s heaps of evidence to the contrary. For
over fifteen years, thousands of recreational and subsistence fishers
have been complaining about the declining kahawai fishery and they
have plenty of proof to back up their complaints. The Ministry has
managed the fishery so badly that the average Kiwi fishermen today
has to fish for five hours to catch just one kahawai. Twenty years
ago they could have caught fifteen fish in that same five-hour period!
But the Ministry seems intent on repeating the scampi fiasco; rewarding
members of their old boy network with quota and, as the Select Committee
said, “building on past errors and injustices rather than
taking steps to rectify them”. The difference this time
is that the conflict is not just between a handful of commercial
fishers; the conflict is between one corporation, Sanfords, and
a million disenfranchised Kiwis. Over a million Kiwis depend on
kahawai they’ve caught for seafood. Many of these people are
financially disadvantaged and cannot afford to buy fish. The only
way they can get it is to catch it for themselves.
The Ministry’s own study showed that kahawai are worth fifteen
times more to the recreational sector than to the commercial. Despite
this, MFish wants to continue with the status quo, costing the country
over a hundred million dollars in economic activity a year. The
irony is that Sanfords doesn’t even profit from the fishery.
Kahawai are so low valued that they barely make enough to keep their
purse seiners running.
The Ministry has ignored the objections of the recreational and
subsistence fishers for many years and now they want to hand over
the property rights of all Kiwis to one corporation, their friends
at Sanfords. This is going to hurt a lot of people and has already
begun to arouse considerable anger.
Can you intervene and restore the historical rights of all New Zealanders,
correcting past injustices dictated by the Ministry of Fisheries?
Sincerely,
Mark Feldman M.D.
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