That is where your 15 a day would be of help compared to 7 a day you would need only half the people fishing to feed said community meaning more hands left to do other jobs :) that is why we would like an increase in recreational quota.

Doesn't work that way. Increase it to 15 per day and many would increase their take to 15 per day - to sell. Maybe what we really need is 35 per week. That's going to be a little difficult to enforce though.

And it still comes down to how many can be taken sustainably.

A person feeding a community is a community good and this should be counted before quota is set

I have no interest in "recreational quota" I do not fish for "recreation". But people do fish for their community, and I do when hungry! this amount is not unsustainable and should be counted first .

A person feeding a community is a community good and this should be counted before quota is set

You can't do that. All that is taken needs to be set against the sustainable limit.

But people do fish for their community, and I do when hungry! this amount is not unsustainable

Actually, we don't know although I'm sure that the government has the figures available and it is on those figures that they reduced the private take. In other words, it probably isn't sustainable.

On point that was obvious to me was that the government, by reducing only the private take, was acting to protect the commercial take.

One point that was obvious to me was that the government, by reducing only the private take, was acting to protect the commercial take.
So you are saying that the Government is for the profit of commercial enterprise.
Stuff the people, So how are we to fix this???

fred look
I have no interest in “recreational quota” I do not fish for “recreation”. But people do fish for their community, and I do when hungry! this amount is not unsustainable and should be counted first .

I know what you are talking about Fred. "Recreational" is just the word the government use to describe any fishing of a non-commercial nature.

Draco T Bastard
Doesn’t work that way. Increase it to 15 per day and many would increase their take to 15 per day - to sell. Maybe what we really need is 35 per week. That’s going to be a little difficult to enforce though.
And it still comes down to how many can be taken sustainably.

In no way shape or form do I encourage the home/community fisherman to on sell their catch. Most community minded fishermen know their fishing area better then the govt would. They would only catch to their community need.

Most community minded fishermen know their fishing area better then the govt would.

Most fishermen haven't got a clue as to what fish are in the sea and what can be sustainably taken. This whole thread started because of that ignorance.

They would only catch to their community need.

Which is probably too much. That's what you don't seem to understand. There is a limit to how many fish can be taken from the sea sustainably and at the moment it appears that we're taking too many and a large part of that take would be the 'recreational' fishers.

So you are saying that the Government is for the profit of commercial enterprise.
Stuff the people, So how are we to fix this???

It's a National government so of course they're legislating in favour of commercial interests. We live in a market economy so it's a little difficult to fix but to start to have a reasonable discussion about it we need the answers to the five questions I ask above at a bare minimum.

I have watched this mess from the introduction of quota. I wont vote on the decision because it does not state a single premise and then asks us to vote yes to mean no!..... At the time that quotas were introduced the option existed as it does now to simply remove a small number of very large vessels that take the most fish. The quota system results in the price of fish in queen street being set on the auction floor in tokyo. My solution. seperate out local consumption comercial or "recreational" first so that NZ is fed. if that is unsustainiable (unlikely) then quota that. if local consumption is sustainiable (more likely) then licence some catch for export.

@fredlook

That won't work. We really do need to know what the sustainable catch rate and then to parcel that out equitably. Basically, we need the quota system.

@colinengland explain what you mean by "equitably"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/equitably

characterized by equity or fairness; just and right; fair; reasonable:
equitable treatment of all citizens.

ahh you mean balancing the rights of people to eat against corporate rights to exploit the resource?

Trawlers have sophisticated gear to find schools of fish & the paths they travel. They rape the schools before they get close to land where only the few that get through may be caught by recreational fishers. They take snapper 25cm long which cannot even produce a fillet worth eating then send most of them overseas leaving us paying stupid prices for something that should be cheap & plentiful. These 25cm snappers don't even mature enough to reproduce but they take them anyway and blame recreational fishers for the stocks going down. Being without a boat I can spend a lot of money in gas, bait, ect traveling to a place where i 'might' catch a fish if I'm lucky. Since that law came into effect if I catch a 28cm snapper I will NOT throw it back. I will cook & eat it right there if I have to. If I get caught cooking it I will throw it back in front of the person & use a type of loophole these govt. bastards do.. They don't state what condition it must be in when I release it. If it dies before I can release it the law does not state anything about whether it be thrown back raw or cooked. Why should we suffer because some large export companies want to keep earning billions at our expense?! They are criminals in my eyes! Just because Fukushima has made fish unsafe to eat in many parts of the world why should they get ours? Soon we probably see fish with radiation sickness here too! Ever tried to buy a paua in NZ?? $60.00 for ONE just legal one & $80.00 for ONE larger one. Why is it I can buy scallops from China for $10.00 yet ours are over $20.00 for us to buy? Every time I see 25cm snappers in fish shops I feel disgusted that they are allowed to do this especially when we (recreational fishers) get the blame for stock numbers declining. If these commercial fishers who send our fish to other countries did not exist any NZer could go to almost any beach & have a high chance of catching a feed. I believe in retaining the fish stocks & all my life I have I have stuck to sizes and quotas but no more, To those criminal bastards who made the law to suit multi million dollar industries I give you the finger. I no longer hear you! I take ingredients for raw fish with me when I go fishing, Good luck measuring cubes of fish aholes!

ahh you mean balancing the rights of people to eat against corporate rights to exploit the resource?

No @fredlook, I do not mean that. I mean exactly what the word means. Nothing more, nothing less.

Everyone's first question when it comes to the use of our limited resources should be:

What is the sustainable rate of use?

And it should be that because if we go beyond that rate then our children and their children will be far worse off. This thread is, essentially, saying:

F the children, we'll take what we want now.

@colinengland www.fish.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/26E8631E.../QAssnapper9Aug2013.pdf Here are answers to yours now answer mine.
(Cant figure out why that link dosnt work pasted)

@fredlook

You haven't asked a question that I haven't answered.

And here's the working link:
http://www.fish.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/26E8631E-5590-4CD6-9DB3-48771D4C2E74/0/QAssnapper9Aug2013.pdf

@colinengland thnx for link. my question is what is your position on equitable balance between the needs of hungry locals against corporate profit. It is interesting that the target level is 40% of unfished, seems a bit low to me.

Two things:

1. The total fish catch should be equitable across the population. Most people eat fish but most people don't go fishing thus the commercial fishers provide fish for those that don't fish
2. Those commercial fishers need to have enough income to cover their other living expenses. I don't consider shareholders to be commercial fishers - I consider them to be bludgers.

Now considering the catch and how it's broken up we probably need to break it up a bit more than it is now. Specifically, we need to break up the catch into that which is caught for domestic use and that which is caught for export. If the catch needs to be reduced then the export catch should be reduced first. A country should always default to feeding it's people first.

The domestic catch should probably be weighted to commercial fishers because, as I said, most people don't actually go fishing and yet they should still have equitable access to eating fish.

I note, from your link, that the allowance for customary and recreational fishers is 2600 tonnes but the actual estimated catch was 3800 tonnes. Now if we increased the recreational catch to 15 fish per person per day from the present 7 that catch would go up to just over ~8000 tonnes. Which I suspect probably isn't sustainable at all never mind letting the fish recover to pre-fished levels.

@colinengland yup all good with that. so looking for amount of domestic consumption and what proportion of commercial catch is domestic, export.

Now that is a larger discussion.

1. Determine maximum catch
2. Determine how much fish is consumed domestically
3. Minus that from maximum catch, anything left over is for available for export
4. Split domestic consumption into recreational/commercial amounts.

Good stuff :)

Off topic a bit... but if the NZ ocean is our foodbasket, what then are our soils? Our water?

15 snapper per day is unsustainable - and that's without commercial fishing.

I have thought about this lots. There are sizes, for each fish species, that are the main breeding size and if we put the small ones back (to get bigger,) put the breeders back, and eat the ones inbetween, as recreational fisherpeople we will have a sustainable catch. Commercial fishing - we need to police our waters better,

@janebutter

It's more complicated than that.

1. We have to determine how many fish are being bred in each species every year per breeder
2. Take less than that number and
3. We have take fish that are bigger than the main breeding size as you say (There is no in between) to ensure that breeding will continue

This gives us a maximum amount of fish that can be fished from our waters. Then we break that number up into recreational and commercial with the commercial then being broken up into local sales and export. This system is called a Quota System. It's somewhat modified from the present system but not by much.

The main point is that it's unlikely that we'll see the present recreational numbers increase because doing so is unsustainable.