The remarkable turnaround in the orange roughy fishery is told in a new book, Roughy on the Rise, by Seafood New Zealand chief executive Tim Pankhurst, who is the former editor of The Dominion Post, Evening Post, The Press and Nelson Mail. He charts the discovery of this mysterious deepwater fish in the 1970s, its exploitation, first by foreign and then local fishers, leading to its decline and then its recovery to be recognised by the gold standard of sustainable fishing.
Introduction: Like no other fish
Everybody was riding the roughy boom from a cash-strapped government in a struggling economy, to daring inshore fishermen in overladen boats, to corporates and family-owned businesses seeing their balance sheets bulge and their names appear on the NBR Rich List. Bigger deepwater boats were arriving, profits were funding expansion into new aquaculture ventures in mussels and salmon, foreigners were being forced out or into joint ventures, the processing factories were driving employment and opportunity for the unskilled in struggling provincial towns and cities, and affluent buyers in the United States could not get enough of this newly discovered miracle fish with the unprepossessing name. Orange roughy was white gold.
Roughy could hardly be described as handsome but to D’Urville Islander Lindsay Elkington every one was beautiful. “To me, each one represented a $2 coin,” he said. As skipper of the Seafresh vessel Newfoundland Lynx fishing the Louisville Ridge far out in the Pacific Ocean beyond the Chathams in the mid-1990s, he once called his crew to the bridge when they lost a bag of roughy hauling the trawl. He gave each of them a $2 coin and told them to toss it overboard, driving home the worth of each fish to the vessel.
“Orange roughy is like no other fishing,” he said. “It’s challenging and you’ve gotta know what you’re doing. If you get it wrong you risk losing $200,000 worth of fishing gear and don’t make any money. But if you get it right you can do really well. As a fisherman there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a big bag of orange roughy pop up on the surface behind the boat.”
Orange roughy was also to become one of the most controversial fisheries in the world, widely seen as the epitome of poor management. The clamour was so great that it is not uncommon to find the view that orange roughy are extinct. The species has featured on virtually every environmental NGO’s red list for unsustainable fisheries.
Orange roughy’s epitaph has been written numerous times. Mark Kurlansky in Cod references orange roughy, a fish that “immediately gained such popularity that five tons an hour were being hauled from the depths near New Zealand.” He then incorrectly added: “In 1995 the catch nearly vanished.” In fact the catch that year was 21,300 tonnes and it remained around that level until 2000.
But while it was overfished and catches have dropped dramatically, stocks are rebuilding. In December 2016 the Marine Stewardship Council, the global gold standard of sustainable fisheries, awarded its coveted certification to the three largest New Zealand orange roughy stocks. Fisheries do recover under careful management backed by sound science. This is a story of loss and of redemption and of the men and women who shaped the world’s largest orange roughy fishery.
National Business Review (NBR)