Curbs Are Needed to Save the Fish
Mining the Sea: Curbs Are Needed to Save the Fish
The delectable onaga, the delicate opakapaka: For good reason, these fish are among the most prized of Hawai’i’s catch. And for the same reason, their numbers in water off the Main Hawaiian Islands seem to be on the brink of crashing.
Two bodies could act now to halt further decline: the state Legislature, or the Department of Land and Natural Resources, through its Division of Aquatic Resources. Both, however, have been too cowed by private interests to muster the political courage needed to protect the state’s fisheries. The management options that are politically palatable are hardly worth the bother of implementing. Those that stand a chance of saving the fish will probably kill the political fortunes of anyone audacious enough to propose them.
It is always possible that the people whose livelihood rests in good measure on the health of bottomfish – fishermen, restaurateurs, auctioneers, wholesalers – will act on their own to ensure that the fish survive. It’s possible, too, that the sun won’t rise tomorrow. Possible, but hardly thinkable.
Puzzling Behavior
Whenever the state of Hawai’i has been urged to take action, the unwavering response has been: We don’t have enough data to warrant it. In a nutshell, this is the response that Henry Sakuda, director of the Division of Aquatic Resources, gave to Environment Hawai’i last December, when we first asked him what the state would be doing to manage declining stocks of opakapaka and onaga.
Of course, whenever any decision is made to follow a course of action that entails hardship on one or another sector of the community; it is essential that the decision be backed up by sound information. In this case, one can hardly expect fishermen to forswear going after these, and perhaps other, bottomfish, if there’s no evidence to suggest their losses will not eventually be repaid, in the form of healthier fishing grounds.
The state acknowledges this. Until last month, however, it had not been willing to change its catch report forms in a way that would improve the quality of data being collected. In fact, as our article shows, the state’s resistance to remedying this problem has a long, if hardly honorable, history. The new catch report forms required to be filed monthly by commercial fishermen are a step in the right direction perhaps, but are cumbersome and difficult to fill out properly. The more complex reporting requirements become, the more opportunities for error arise, even among fishermen intent on filing accurate reports, And the more opportunities for error there are, the more unreliable data generated from those reports become.
What should have been a straightforward matter of amending catch forms dragged out over years. If the state Department of Land and Natural Resources has so little spine that it can barely manage this simple task, it is almost inconceivable that, absent an absolute crash of bottomfish stocks, it will find the political will needed to do anything involving more substantive action.
A Sea Change
In 1979, the state published the Hawai’i Fisheries Development Plan, full of bright hope for expansion of the state’s commercial fishing industry. The 1985 update of that plan was more temperate in its expectation. The most recent plan, to cover the years 1990 to 1995 (although it was not published until June 1992), is by contrast almost grim.
The plan was prepared by a private consulting firm, LMR Fisheries Research, Inc., of San Diego, California. Gently rebuking the DLNR Division of Aquatic Resources for its past development-oriented policies, the plan’s authors write: “Continued work for development of Hawai’i’s fisheries still might be beneficial to the state. However, the main problem facing Hawai’i in the immediate future is resource conservation and allocation, and development programs should not dilute, or divert from the main mission of the DAR: protecting, restoring, and allocating Hawai’i’s marine resources.”
This turnaround in the concept of what the Division of Aquatic Resources should be doing took more than a decade. Who knows how long it may take to achieve a turnaround in actual practice?
One thing may be said with certain: If that day arrives sooner as a result of an enlightened administration, the state may yet be able to impose management practices that are effective while still allowing limited catches of bottomfish. If the state resists taking action until the population of onaga and opakapaka in state waters crashes, the range of management options available to the state will be more limited, more Draconian, and more likely to require years or decades to bear fruit.
Mahalo Plenty!
Environment Hawai’i extends its deepest gratitude to the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco and to the Hawai’i La’ie-ikawai Association of Windward O’ahu. Both have made recent and generous grants to support the newsletter’s continuing operations.
Volume 4, Number 9 March 1994
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