Commercial fishers believe that immediate action is required to improve the economic viability of the Moreton Bay Trawl Fishery (MBTF). Challenges relate to inefficiencies and resource utilisation, specifically (i) gear efficiency; (ii) harvest rules; (iii) fuel consumption; (iv) over-capitalisation; (v) seasonal closure effects on deployment of capital; (vi) harvesting for market demand; and (vii) environmental impacts of the fishery. In addition, the fishery is operating in a global environment of falling prawn prices and increasing fuel prices.

Exacerbating these challenges is the recent implementation of the Moreton Bay Marine Park Zoning Plan. In addition to loss of fishing grounds for conservation, the State Government’s Marine Park Structural Adjustment Package, which sought to remove active fishing licences from the Bay, failed to address effort displacement. This has led to reduced economic yield from fished areas and increased ecological impacts. The impacts to fishers include increased competition in open areas, higher steaming, social and labour costs, and market impact through targeting sub-optimal product. In summary, the ecological, social and economic costs to fishers have increased.

The rising costs of production have motivated fishers to address profitability. Harvest strategies aimed at optimising economic performance would help address these issues and potentially offer the MBTF greater resource security.

Implementation of harvest strategies may be improved by changing the regulatory framework of the fishery. This would provide benefits from a compliance, monitoring and reporting perspective. Currently, the 10 year review of the Queensland East Coast Trawl Fishery Management Plan is underway. Whilst the primary objective of the review is to update the Plan with respect to delivering the best long term economic benefits for society through effective and sustainable management of Queensland’s fisheries resources, it also provides an opportunity for regulatory change for improved harvest strategies in the MBTF

Given the general decline in GVP for the Australian wild capture prawn industry (from $364 million to $232 million in the last 15 years), and particularly the loss of traditional export markets, the industry needs to focus on optimising value in the domestic market. However it has become apparent that the current and established business models being pursued by many wild harvest prawn companies are not set up to optimize the domestic market opportunities. The change from an export focused to a domestic focused business requires companies to have a better understanding of the competitive landscape and of the customer and distribution channel requirements (for both quality and service) in domestic markets in order to identify and exploit new market opportunities. However, it appears this knowledge is currently not available or, in the case of a number of completed CRC consumer surveys, not being well extended to the Australian prawn industry to faciliate changing business models to increase profitability.

This project aims to work with committed prawn industry leaders to extend current results from previous CRC and other consumer/market studies, identify gaps and if necessary commission further research to identify new domestic market opportunities. Subsequently industry leaders will be empowered to work with all chain participants resulting in identification of supply chain innovations (in service and quality) and promotionional strategies required to meet the identified opportunity. Subsequently all chain participants will agree collectively to co-invest to implement the required strategies. The participatory action nature of the research, with identification, commitment and active involvement of industry champions and all chain participants being mandatory to the process, represents an innovation in CRC research and should ensure commercial outcomes.

The MRAG report and the two Alternative Management Workshops have highlighted a short-list of four management scenarios (including three ITQ scenarios) that might optimise the economic situation of the NPF whilst ensuring it remains environmentally sustainable. Semi-quantitative techniques have been used to provide a preliminary evaluation of these scenarios and a preliminary cost-benefit analysis has also been conducted. This preliminary work was unable to combine all of the relevant costs and benefits for each management scenario because the full data set for such calculations was not yet available, and there was significant time and budget constraints that did not allow a full analysis to be performed.

Given the clear message that any agreed future management regime for the NPF should include ITQs or be demonstrably ‘better than ITQs’, it has come to the point at which a full cost-benefit analysis of the four short-listed management scenarios must be undertaken. This project will perform that work.

A major leap forward in bycatch reduction can be achieved through improved knowledge of factors that affect BRD performance. This can be very effectively achieved in a workshop, focussing on discussion of BRD performance. A workshop also provides fishers an opportunity to discuss new, innovative solutions to bycatch reduction, as well as future directions for related R & D.

The proposal meets the research priorities of the ComFRAB in the following ways:

Innovative approaches to fisheries management: Bringing fishers together provides a unique opportunity for accelerated learning (about successful BRDs) in the industry. Innovative BRD designs will also be a focus of the workshop to provide a basis for new thinking and solutions to bycatch reduction.

Economics of fisheries: Improved BRD performance may translate to reduced codend drag and fuel consumption, improved catch value (per litre of fuel consumed) and possibly increased prawn catches through improved swept-area performance.

People and industry development: This workshop aims to help change the culture of the industry re use of BRDs from ‘minimise their impact’ to maximise their performance’. This change in thinking has occurred for TEDs but the leap has not been made for BRDs. Effective BRDs (in conjunction with the already effective TEDs) will substantially reduce the ecological impact of prawn trawling and improve the reputation of prawn-trawl fisheries.

Cross-fishery issues: This workshop has application to all Australian prawn-trawl fisheries, especially the NPF, Qld ECTF and the Torres Strait fishery, and fishers, managers and researchers from each of these will be involved in the workshop.

This workshop also meets a (high) research priority of NORMAC and QFIRAC by contributing to the development of effective bycatch reduction devices.

Recent assessments of the NPF have identified a need for the fishery to be managed at a finer spatial scale than that of the NPF managed area (AFMA 2003, DEH 2003). The stocks of some prawn species appear to comprise regional subpopulations that, although not genetically isolated, mix little enough to be manageable as separate stocks. This view is consistent with the experience that depleted stocks in some regions (e.g. north of Mornington Island and Weipa) have not recovered when stocks elsewhere in the NPF were healthy.
The assessments also identify a need to broaden the scope of management of the NPF beyond prawn stocks, iconic species and bycatch to include benthic habitats and species. Prawn fishing has a number of impacts on the ecosystem, including: removal of target species; removal of bycatch and byproduct; removal of benthic plants and animals; removal of habitat-forming species; disruption of sediment structure; suspension of sediment; and feeding of dolphins, sharks, seabirds, fish and benthic invertebrates with discards (Poiner et al. 1998). Some impacts, such as removal of seagrass in nursery habitats, are known to negatively affect prawn stocks. Other impacts are likely to affect stocks in unknown ways, positively or negatively, and in some habitats may affect the sustainability of the stocks.
Broadening management of the NPF to include impacts on benthic ecosystems is therefore prudent from both an environmental and industry viewpoint. It is also consistent with the recommendations of the NPF strategic assessment (DEH 2003), and will prepare the industry for the increasingly sophisticated environmental awareness of export markets.
Management of the NPF is currently based on sound stock assessment and population monitoring procedures, and uses maximum sustainable yield as the management limit reference point. Spatial stock assessment has been investigated with mixed success, but is not used operationally. Current environmental management focuses on fragile habitats (mainly seagrass), prawn spawning areas, iconic species (e.g. turtles) and bycatch. Recently, ABARE suggested a move towards economic efficiency targets, such as maximum economic yield. (Rose and Kompass 2004).
To do this the FRDC project 2004/022 will integrate the existing stock and economic assessments into an MSE process.
To enable stock, economic and environmental objectives to be effectively pursued in a spatial context and with minimal conflict, the stock, economic, bycatch and ecosystem components of NPF management must be integrated into a single, spatially explicit management framework. This project will contribute with major missing elements for that integration and will develop this needed spatial management framework. Equally, the timing of this proposal is opportune given that stock assessment and monitoring are already mature, interactions with iconic species and bycatch are becoming well understood, and the integration of stock assessment with economics is currently underway. To achieve highly effective technical communication and integration we will involve PIs from past and present projects and a Steering Committee with members from CSIRO AFMA staff and NORMAC-REC and NPF-RAG members.