US moves to ban new sardine fisheries as Australian regulators flounder

Greens spokesperson for Fisheries, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, applauds the overnight decision in the United States to ban new commercial fisheries for small bait-fish on the US Pacific Coast.

Senator Whish-Wilson said, “Federal fisheries managers in the United States have unanimously voted to adopt a ban on new commercial fisheries for small fish like sardines unless they can demonstrate that there is no impact on local ecosystems.

“This is the sort of ground-breaking shift that is needed in Australia, to move away from a single-species assessment approach to a whole-of-ecosystem approach.

“Without a whole-of-ecosystem approach you end up with the same sort of debacle we had with the attempt to bring the super trawler Margiris out to Australia to target the small pelagic fishery.

“The population of sardines in the US has plummeted in recent decades due to over-fishing, leading to wide-ranging ecosystem effects up the food chain.

“We need to adopt the precautionary approach to prevent that sort of environmental catastrophe here.

“It was just over a decade ago that we saw the signs of a collapse of the small pelagic fishery off the coast of Tasmania.

“The one benefit from the Margiris debacle was that there was a root-and-branch review of fisheries management carried out by former senior public servant David Borthwick AO PSM which called for a new approach addressing ecosystem impacts.

“Unfortunately, the Coalition government, under the direction of Parliamentary Secretary Richard Colbeck, have sidelined the Review and not followed through on the sensible recommendations it contained.

“With a new large trawler on the way to Australia, it is now urgent that Australia immediately adopts the same whole-of-ecosystem approach that has emerged in the US”, he concluded.
Greens spokesperson for Fisheries, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson