Living up to our international fisheries obligations: our submission to FNZ
New Zealand has a unique and important role to play in the health of the world’s oceans. With one of the largest EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zones) in the world, our government has special obligations regarding the exploration and use of marine resources.
ELI has lodged a submission on Fisheries New Zealand (FNZ)’s consultation on “amendments to the Fisheries Act to ensure New Zealand continues to meet its international fisheries obligations”. The rights we have to fish in our EEZ and on the High Seas are given to us by international law, and it is fitting that the government is assessing whether we continue to meet the obligations that come with those rights.
However, instead of seizing an opportunity to ensure our oceans are being sustainably managed in accordance with international standards, the consultation only deals with a small subset of our international obligations relating to fishing outside our waters, and misses two of the most important ones, which are:
Improving our implementation of the precautionary approach
Adopting ecosystem-based management for our fisheries
Source - NOAA
With an EEZ that occupies a relatively generous share of the world’s oceans, New Zealand lags behind in its adoption of international standards and norms. Both the precautionary approach and ecosystem-based management have moved beyond “best practice” in international fisheries management, and are now considered “generally recommended norms”.
Given this, FNZ’s omission of reviewing its application of ecosystem-based management and the precautionary principle from this review means that any findings and legislative changes will be unable to live up to its international obligations.
As we argue in our submission, this consultation provides the perfect opportunity for New Zealand to do a stock take against international developments in fishing over the past 25 years, redress the current inadequacies in the Fisheries Act (we have suggested two), and fully implement the international obligations we have signed up to on the world stage.
Read our full submission below.
