Mike Bhana: Marine reserves 'a band aid'; without commercial fishing cuts

Mike Bhana is a Coromandel-based documentary filmmaker with a passion for oceans. Photo / Supplied

I've been a storyteller my whole life, a natural history filmmaker that has spent more time than most immersed in our environment - watching, listening and learning as documentary filmmakers do.

Things have changed and continue to change at a rapid pace, and in my world it is not for the better.

The lion's share of what I do is on and in the ocean - our oceans, the Pacific's oceans. They are our life blood, offering us up a carbon soak and producing more oxygen than all the greenery on Aotearoa combined. But out of sight out of mind. Most do not see below the shimmering majestic ripple that is the ocean's skin.

All is not well and we are fast approaching a tipping point where much of what we have grown up with will be lost, accelerating our plunge into climate crisis.

Then comes a wee glimmer of hope. A story about greater protection in the pipeline for the Hauraki Gulf. A few more marine reserves to improve the health of this incredibly important marine ecosystem.

But in my view, it's just spin.

Our moana as a whole is in crisis and the band aids that are being applied such as new marine reserves, marine protected areas, rahuis and mataitai will do nothing to stop the cancer. That cancer is overfishing and the methods that we currently use to extract this resource.

Dredging and bottom trawling do unfathomable damage to the sea floor. These out of sight areas are nurseries for our ocean ecosystems and a massive carbon sink for our CO2.

It can take decades for the sea floor to recover from a single dredge or trawl let alone year after year of relentless pressure.

Trawling and dredging also releases upwards of 100 tons of carbon per square kilometre and while we point the bone at agriculture, the elephant in the moana are these archaic fishing methods. But rather than treating the cancer, we simply ignore it. Out of sight out of mind.

Our minister's latest move to offer better protection to the Hauraki Gulf is an example of that. A bit like that token happy birthday wish you make when Facebook reminds you of a friend's birthday.

More marine reserves to try to better protect the gulf is that same tokenism, while we continue to do nothing to reduce overall commercial fishing pressure.

Now don't get me wrong, I would love nothing better than having 30 per cent of our EEZ as marine protected areas, but by doing that and not first reducing the overall fishing pressure we effectively concentrate 100 per cent of the fishing activity on just 70 per cent of our marine environment, making the issues we are facing worse.

Even if these changes to the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park did include greater restrictions on commercial fishing it simply shifts that fishing pressure onto someone else's backyard.

Remember too, virtually none of the inhabitants of a marine reserve spend their entire life cycle in that one place. Fish move and travel to spawn, crayfish walk and their larvae drift for 18 to 24 months before settling on the reef. Scallops too drift for two to three weeks, and even paua drift as larvae for 4-8 days.

You see that so clearly at Goat Island Marine reserve where crayfish numbers mirror the species collapse outside the reserve, plummeting inside as well. There were more crayfish at Goat Island before it was declared a marine reserve than there is now.

As much as 80 per cent of the crayfish larvae that end up calling the Hauraki Gulf home come from elsewhere.

Places like Gisborne where the fishery too is dire straits. Everything is connected and we need ecosystem-based management if we are to stand any chance of seeing restored fish numbers and healthy ocean ecosystems.

I am not anti-commercial fishing either. I would like nothing better than to see sustainable artisanal fishers back in every coastal community like we used to have.

We need to be able to harvest from the moana, our communities need to be able to get feed and our fishermen need to be able to make a living supplying those of us who cannot. What I am against is slipper skippers, corporations and shareholders who know little and care less about our oceans, instead profiting from them.

It's all a bit of a mess really. In 2020 I released a film on the state of our fisheries called The Price of Fish, https://vimeo.com/439090543.

It told the story of the real state of our moana and showed a little of what is currently going on.

Recreational and Māori take less than 3 per cent of the fish in our EEZ, the rest is scooped up mainly by corporations and big companies with little regard for anything other than bottom line profit. This simply must change.

Imposing more marine restricted areas on recreational fishermen who fish to feed their families and benefit from the wellness that this gives them doesn't solve the problem.

Fix the cancer first, address this rampant overfishing by the commercial sector, eliminate the hugely destructive methods being used and then and only then will the marine protected areas work.

We owe our children an opportunity to see and taste what we have in our lifetimes, and if we really want this then a couple more reserves is not going to help.

Fish are a common property resource that belong to all New Zealanders, they are not the property of commercial interests. It's time for us to become kaitiaki of our kaimoana once again.