Could it happen here ?

Documentarian Guye Henderson spent a year researching the New Zealand fishing industry which now outsources a lot of the catching sector jobs.

The result is that early half of the NZ deep-sea fish quotas are caught by overseas trawlers, and more than half of all fish caught are processed overseas.

According to Henderson, quotas can be sold to foreign operators who don’t have to pay their crews as well or follow health and safety rules to the same letter as NZ operators. The wage bill on a NZ vessel, for example, is about $NZ4.2 million, whereas the equivalent charter from Eastern Europe or Asia costs around a quarter of that.

NZ has had the capacity to fish all its own quotas since 1996, so local commercial fisherman are missing out as are those studying fish stocks who often rely on data from less forthcoming foreign operators who Henderson believes might deliberately overfish some species as the fines aren’t big enough to deter them.

Could it happen here ? Is it already happening on the Costa Oeste ?

Category: Commercial