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WORLD BEATER ? IS OUR QMS REALLY A BY GARETH MORGAN AND GEOFF SIMMONS T he quota management system was introduced in 1986 amid a flurry of reforms under the Labour government. It handed out individual, tradeable quotas for the right to catch fish in New Zealand's ocean. It has been hailed as world-leading but has never been formally evaluated by our government. Has it worked? Our book, Hook Line and Blinkers, looks at this issue in far more detail, but we will give you a summary of some key messages. We chose to use the criteria used by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in assessing fisheries management. It is worth bearing in mind up front that the reasons for setting up the QMS in the first place were different. At the time it was created, Roger Douglas was doing his magic and economics was king. The New Zealand inshore fishery was getting pummelled, while we were leaving the offshore stocks to the Russians and Japanese. Getting our fishing industry going was foremost in Douglas' mind, and environmental sustainability was only considered in that it would ensure an on-going supply of fish. Of course nowadays our aims are broader, and any policy should be able to keep up with the times. There were some early hiccups in implementing the new system. Fishers fought tooth and nail for quota, as you would expect them too, since this was now their livelihood. Such scraps proved difficult and expensive to resolve, but were eventually settled. Only then did government officials realise they had made two critical errors. Firstly, they hadn't realised that under the Treaty of Waitangi, Maori still owned the fishery, so it wasn't theirs to give away. Secondly, they had, with some scientific hubris, overestimated the sustainable catch of some stocks, particularly orange roughy. Both these errors were expensive to fix, but we won't dwell on them for now. The question is, how is the QMS performing today? It should come as no surprise, given the economic crisis that the QMS was created from, that it has proved to be an economic winner. Fishing capacity has been greatly reduced, making our fishing fleet one of the most efficient in the world and fuelling what is now a major export industry. It also provided the certainty needed for companies to invest the money needed to catch our deepwater stocks. Despite complaints about foreign charter vessels, we now catch more of our deepwater fish than we did when the QMS was created. Environmentally speaking, the results are a bit more mixed. The idea of the QMS is that the fish are now an asset for fishers, so they have an incentive to protect that asset in the long run. This generally seems to have worked. Stocks have certainly rebounded since the QMS was created and most of our fish stocks are reasonably well managed. The exceptions are probably long-living stocks like orange roughy and some inshore stocks where there is heavy competition with recreational and customary fishers. Sorting out recreational fishing is one major area of unfinished business. Of course not all fishers stick to the rules, and inappropriate fishing practices still exist. Part of the problem is that quota owners aren't the ones doing the fishing – they are renting out their quota. The fishers actually doing the fishing have no incentive to look 32 Professional Skipper January/February 2012 after fish stocks, they face low margins and high quality demands, thanks to the quota rental arrangements. This pushes them to the limit, leading to inappropriate practices. In our view, the answer is 100 percent observer coverage, which can only happen on inshore vessels via video surveillance. A review of rental practices might also be needed. Perhaps quota owners should underwrite any penalties faced by fishers they rent quota to. While the QMS gives an incentive to look after the fish stocks, there is no corresponding incentive to worry about the wider environment. This is where the fishing industry has struck problems over bottom trawling and the capture of seabirds and marine mammals. We like to claim our fisheries management is the best in the world, but a World Wildlife Fund review ranked us eighth and we mostly fell down over environmental issues. The formation of environmental standards was intended to cover these, but they have been slow to emerge from the Ministry of Fisheries. On the equity ledger, the QMS has proved to be a failure. A massive public asset was handed over to fishers free of charge and has ended up concentrated in the hands of a few large corporates. The public has nothing to show for this privatisation, since the resource rental was scrapped, save perhaps a little more tax revenue from fishing companies (if we are lucky). Some smaller-scale fishers have ended up as serfs in their own boats, although they can't complain too much, as most of them were probably given quota to start with. Boat crews and small towns were the real losers, as they were not compensated for the concentration of the fishing industry that followed the creation of the QMS. This is the one area that really let the QMS down, and make no mistake, other countries have seen and learnt from this hard lesson. Unfortunately, this is all water under the bridge now and is very difficult to fix. As far as procedure goes, the New Zealand system is as good as any around the world. But that doesn't mean it is as good as it could be. Fisheries management is a tangled web of different interest groups. The Minister of Fisheries and MFish are stuck in the middle and end up micro-managing every issue. Ministers have to balance their desire for votes by appeasing recreational and environmental lobbyists, but commercial interests have the most time for lobbying and the deepest pockets for litigation. If recreational fishers were brought within the QMS and strong, measurable environmental standards were created, then the minister and MFish could step back from this intrusive management and let the users run it for themselves. Fisheries' management decisions could be completely depoliticised. The government and environmental groups could step back and take more of an oversight or governance role. In short, the QMS has achieved most of what it initially promised when it was designed in the 1980s. But fisheries management is a moving beast and we can't expect this one policy to be a silver bullet. We need to keep on top of the issues and allow our fisheries management system to evolve in response. That is something that we haven't done so well, particularly in the last decade.