- The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), a multilateral body that regulates fishing in the vast waters of the South Pacific Ocean, held its annual meeting Feb. 17-21 in Santiago, Chile.
- At the meeting, Aotearoa New Zealand blocked an effort to implement a rule that would reduce bottom trawling, a fishing practice that disrupts the seabed, in areas occupied by vulnerable marine ecosystems.
- Conservationists lambasted New Zealand’s move, while a New Zealand official defended the country’s approach.
- In other meeting news, the parties raised the fishing quota for jack mackerel above scientifically advised limits and, at the same time, moved forward toward adopting a harvest strategy for the stock that could prevent such abrupt quota hikes in the future.
Aotearoa New Zealand spent years spearheading the introduction of a new set of rules governing bottom trawling in the South Pacific Ocean, which more than a dozen countries adopted by consensus in 2023. But under a new government, the country has now blocked an effort to fully implement those rules.
Australia and the United States put forward a proposal to fully enact the 2023 rules at the annual meeting of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), held Feb. 17-21 in Santiago, Chile. This would protect a minimum of 70% of species or groups of species that indicate the presence of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). In so doing it would reduce the area open to trawling, a fishing practice that disrupts the seabed, by about 45%. However, the two countries deferred the measure to next year “with reluctance” due to the resistance from New Zealand, the only country whose vessels have bottom trawled in the SPRFMO’s regulatory area in recent years.
Conservationists lambasted New Zealand’s move to block the measure.
“While other SPRFMO members reaffirmed their strong support for the implementation of agreed measures to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems, New Zealand took a position that defies science, weakens our confidence in the implementation of international commitments, and leaves some of the planet’s most fragile and biodiverse marine ecosystems at risk,” Bronwen Golder, director of the deep-sea fisheries seamounts campaign at the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), an umbrella group of NGOs, said in a statement.
In other news from the meeting, SPRFMO parties reached consequential decisions related to pelagic fisheries. These included raising the fishing quota for jack mackerel (Trachurus symmetricus) above scientifically advised limits and, at the same time, moving toward adopting a harvest strategy for the stock that could prevent such abrupt quota hikes in the future.
Trawling politics
The SPRFMO, which has 16 member nations plus the European Union and whose regulatory area encompasses the vast international waters of the South Pacific, has debated the issue of bottom trawling for many years. Conservationists decry the fishing method because it involves dragging heavy nets and other gear along the seabed, damaging the ecosystems in its path. The New Zealand-based industry lobby High Seas Fisheries Group (HSFG) counters that regional rules, including the SPRFMO’s, have become too tight over the last two decades, impeding the right to fish sustainably and causing job losses.
The current New Zealand government took office in November 2023 and is led by a conservative coalition sympathetic to the industry’s arguments. Shane Jones, the minister for oceans and fisheries and a member of the New Zealand First party, a junior coalition partner, has in the past received election funding from fishing companies, telling attendees of a 2019 seafood conference that he was “incredibly pro-industry,” and later calling himself an “apostle of industry.” This month, he pushed for fisheries deregulation and suggested he might campaign for New Zealand to withdraw from the SPRFMO.
Jones called Australia and the U.S. “combatants” when speaking to the media about their proposal to implement the 70% VME rule.
The SPRFMO adopted the 2023 measure per the advice of its scientific committee. The HSFG opposed the measure’s adoption, but conservationists didn’t consider it an outright win, having argued there should be 100% protection of VMEs, per international law.
Although the measure is in force, its central rule on 70% VME protection hasn’t been implemented, largely because New Zealand blocked it both in 2024 and this year. However, the country’s position has evolved. Last year, its opposition wasn’t clear-cut: The delegation said it needed more time to assess, as a new government. This time, New Zealand took a stronger position against the measure, drawing criticism from conservationists.
“This year, they [New Zealand’s representatives] have come and openly opposed the measure and sort of rejected its premise, really rejected the responsibility and obligation that SPRFMO members have to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems,” Golder of the DSCC told Mongabay. “And they do that with quite an amount of enthusiasm. They did not excuse their position by saying, ‘We’ve had an election. We haven’t had advice.’ This year, they said, ‘We oppose it because it threatens the commercial viability of our industry.’”
New Zealand had the power to stop the implementation because the SPRFMO and other regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) around the globe generally use consensus decision-making, enabling one dissenting party to scuttle any measure.
Charlotte Denny, an official at New Zealand’s Ministry of Primary Industries, which oversees fisheries, told Mongabay in an emailed statement that the country’s delegation explored with other nations how the 2023 measure “might fit in a wider package of bottom fishing management measures that better provide for sustainable use and conservation.” She cited a recent performance review of the SPRFMO completed by independent experts in November that found the measure “not fit for purpose.”
The performance review suggests that the bottom trawling restrictions in the measure are too complex, bring “unintended consequences” for industry, and that the SPRFMO should develop a more “flexible and adaptive management strategy” that considers the economic viability of the fishing industry — a finding the conservation groups objected to. However, the authors of the review also found that the SPRFMO’s failure to implement the 70% VME rule over the advice of the scientific committee was “not ideal practice,” that the rule should be considered binding and that “the change in government within one member country should not absolve the commission from its obligations.”
Trawling in the South Pacific has been on the decline for the past two decades. New Zealand is the only country to trawl in SPRFMO waters since 2019. From May 2022 until April 2024, no bottom trawlers, aside from one research vessel, worked in the area, but two New Zealand-flagged vessels restarted trawling there later in 2024. They together reached the quota for allowable catch of orange roughy (Hoplostethus atlanticus), a deepwater fish that trawlers target, on Westpac Bank, a series of small volcanic features just outside New Zealand waters, according to Denny.
There’s debate about how much orange roughy catch should be allowed at Westpac Bank. In Santiago, the parties settled on 177 metric tons, a compromise between the scientific committee’s recommendation of 111 metric tons and New Zealand’s request for 285 metric tons.
The parties also increased the permitted carryover of unused quota of orange roughy throughout the regulatory area, allowing for 100% of it to be used the following year. The DSCC and the NGO Environment and Conservation Organisations of NZ Aotearoa unsuccessfully opposed the move, which upped the limit from 10%. The ecological impact of carryover is not clear but it may increase fishing’s “footprint” on VMEs, according to a 2023 scientific committee report. The 100%-over-one-year outcome was negotiated down from a New Zealand proposal to allow carryover of two years’ worth of unused quota. This would have allowed trawlers to take three years’ worth of catch in a single year if they hadn’t fished the previous two years.
Other meeting news
Another decision pertained to jack mackerel, whose populations in the South Pacific were once heavily overexploited but have recovered under SPRFMO management. The push to conserve the species was in fact a driving force behind the creation of the SPRFMO in 2012. The parties instituted a harvest control rule for jack mackerel in 2013 and the stock is now well above its “biomass at maximum sustainable yield,” a commonly used threshold for assessing a healthy stock, and overfishing is no longer occurring. It’s a success story, according to Dave Gershman, a senior officer on RFMO policy at Pew Charitable Trusts, a U.S.-based NGO.
Yet this year, the parties opted to violate the harvest control rule and increase the jack mackerel quota by 25% for 2025 — more than the 15% allowed by the harvest control rule and advised by the scientific committee. The quota applies to the SPRFMO’s regulatory area and Chilean waters collectively. Chile, the top harvester of jack mackerel, proposed a 44% increase to the quota, but other parties negotiated the proposal down.
Gershman said the 25% quota increase was still disappointing. “It really demonstrates why the commission needs to modernize its management of this stock,” he told Mongabay.
In fact, the parties did make some progress toward modernization: They set a path for the adoption of a fully fledged harvest strategy for jack mackerel in 2026, with the scientific preparations to be completed in the coming year. Harvest strategies, also called management procedures, set up largely automatic science-based fisheries management decisions for the long term, reducing opportunities for industry or political influence. They’re considered a best practice in fisheries management. Gershman called the SPRMO’s progress on the jack mackerel harvest strategy, which would be the first for any SPRFMO stock, “good news.”
However, the news was not as good, from Pew’s perspective, for jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas). SPRMFO parties didn’t tighten regulations for the enormous squid fishery, which according to Pew harvested around 1 million metric tons in SPRFMO waters in 2022, up tenfold from 2000. Ecuador put forth two proposals to strengthen data reporting requirements and create area-based and seasonal closures to protect the squid, but SPRFMO parties didn’t adopt them.
Banner image: Bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea), a species that indicates the presence of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) in the South Pacific Ocean. Image courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute via Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: A recent discussion with several experts about the work and decisions of influential but secretive regional fisheries management organizations, listen here to learn more:
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Correction 3/5/2025: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Westpac Bank was the bottom fishing area that would see most of the reduction in allowable trawling area under the implementation of the 70% rule. In fact, this rule would not affect the allowable trawling area at Westpac Bank, although it would affect nearby bottom fishing areas. The article has been amended to remove this inaccuracy. We regret the error.
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