Over the past two decades, fewer vessels have trawled the South Pacific’s high seas. Companies from only one country have kept at it, an island nation with a green reputation: Aotearoa New Zealand.
Most of the trawling is legal, for now, but in late August, a New Zealand court convicted a subsidiary of Talley’s Group Ltd., one of the country’s major seafood companies, of illegal trawling in a closed area in the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia. The judge fined the company NZ$59,000 (about $33,000) and the skipper NZ$12,000 (about $7,000), and seized the vessel. The case took four years to reach this conclusion: the illegal trawling took place over a 10-day period in 2018.
The verdict, which the company did not appeal, follows a series of other recent convictions of New Zealand trawling companies but differs in that it took place on the high seas, or international waters, rather than inside the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). It comes amid a campaign by environmental NGOs to restrict trawling and protect the region’s most ecologically important marine areas.
“The industry is definitely feeling the heat,” Duncan Currie, a New Zealand-based legal adviser to both the High Seas Alliance and the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), two umbrella groups of international environmental NGOs, told Mongabay. In this case, Talley’s tried to avoid liability by blaming the individual skipper, but the court “didn’t buy it,” he said.
Still, Currie and other environmental advocates weren’t fully satisfied. “It’s good that the company was convicted, but the degree of accountability is not enough,” he said, explaining that the vessel forfeiture was only “on paper” and the fines weren’t high enough to create a strong deterrent to illegal trawling.
The conviction comes amid an ongoing debate about trawling in New Zealand, with campaigners calling for a ban on bottom trawling on submarine mountains, and the industry disputing their arguments and resisting aspects of the proposed change.