The news that the Central American nation of Panama has moved to restrict longlining for swordfish, tuna, marlin and sailfish in its waters should both delight and depress Australian anglers and conservationists. It comes on top of Peru’s decision to completely ban commercial sale of all marlin species and sailfish, reported in last November’s Fisho.
Costa Rica is reported to be considering similar moves. In the USA it’s already illegal to commercially harvest Atlantic marlin, sailfish and spearfish and to import Atlantic-caught billfish, although they still import and consume a lot of Pacific-sourced fish, reportedly 1,260 tonnes between 2003 and 2006. There is a Bill before the US Congress to stop billfish sales completely; more details will be in the March magazine.
So good things are happening on the other side of the Pacific, but here we persist with our longlining of striped marlin and the inevitable loss of “accidentally” hooked blues and blacks, and that’s depressing. We keep our swordfish fishery going with no useful information on stock structure or fish behaviour. I’ve lost count of the thousands of words and hundreds of column inches that Jim Harnwell, Dean Butler, myself and other Fisho writers and readers have devoted to the complete folly of potentially destroying a wonderful recreational and economic resource for limited short-term commercial gain for a small number of operators.
Successive Federal governments have ignored detailed studies showing that the dollar value of a well managed, C&R based recreational billfish industry far outweighs the short-term economic “benefits” of longlining for a selected few. It has actively and successfully opposed the attempts by some States to stop the landing or retailing of commercially caught billfish within their borders. It even invoked the Australian Constitution to prevent the West Australian government taking such steps.
Does the general non-fishing public really need to eat billfish bought from fish markets or in restaurants? Of course not, despite all the rhetoric pushed out by organisations like the Sydney Fish Market. There are plenty of sustainably caught alternatives and great mulloway and kingfish coming out of the South Australian sea farms. A number of conservation-oriented organisations already make species guides available.
The Yanks are mounting quite sophisticated campaigns to inform the public as to why they shouldn’t be buying billfish and many of their restaurants and supermarket chains now don’t stock these varieties. Take a look at www.takemarlinoffthemenu.org, a site supported jointly by the International Game Fishing Association (IGFA) and the National Coalition for Marine Conservation.
There’s similar data available in Australia but with the de-funding of RECFISH what or who is going to put it all together and package it in a format which might just get some traction with the responsible Federal Ministers, who successively seem to have been captured by their fisheries management bureaucrats and the views of the commercial industry? Former British Labour Party Angling Spokesman, Martin Salter – currently living in Australia and working on developing rec fishing strategies – may have some good ideas. So might you. We’d like to hear them.
John Newbery is Environment Editor for Fishing World.
