Fishing Minister takes to the air
On Thursday morning, Minister for the Ministry of Marine Resources (MMR) Hon Teina Bishop went on Radio Cook Islands in an effort to clear up some misconceptions surfacing in the media regarding such matters as declining catch rates, exploratory fishing and license fees.
The Minister was accompanied by Secretary for MMR Ben Ponia and officials Josh Mitchell and Peter Graham.
Among the key points stressed by the Minister was that the three year exploratory programme (for Big Eye Tuna and Swordfish) is run by and controlled by the Cook Islands and that there is no undue overseas influences. The Minister pointed out that all the Cook Islands wants is its fair share and to achieve this, there is a need to increase our catch. At present we are catching less than one per cent of what we should be catching.
Ponia told the Times on Thursday following the Radio show, that by comparison, the Solomons has over 250 long liners licensed while we have 40. Samoa, with an EEZ just one tenth of ours, catches the same amount of fish that we do.
The Minister said the Cook Islands was trying to get its fair share in a responsible manner. The Minister is keen for fish consumption to increase even if it means the Cook Islands having its own brand of canned fish.
According to Ponia the Cook Islands while it has a large EEZ, is actually under-fishing. The Times recalls that about 10 years ago a Tuna marketing expert from Japan told local tuna fishermen at a meeting that our catch should be around 20,000 tonnes per year. At that time, less than 3,000 tonnes of tuna was being caught. Today the catch is up to around 7,000 tonnes.
Ponia said it was not feasible for the Cook Islands to have its own cannery as this required labour and large quantities of fresh water.
Ponia said the Cook Islands has the highest license fees in the Pacific and $10,000 of each license fee is set aside to develop the local fishery.
Ponia advised that MMR will seek to release more information to the public on a regular basis in regard to catch rates for both the deep sea and local fishery.
Ponia said more local fishermen who were once fishing part time, are now taking up full time fishing charters. Not all local fishermen were forwarding their log books to MMR to capture the catch data so at present it is difficult to put to bed the question of whether there is in fact a declining catch rate. Ponia believes unlike the northern fishery, fishing around Rarotonga is not stable but seasonal. -Charles Pitt

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