International

Developments in the global trade of food have exposed primary producers to a new set of opportunities and risks that are best managed with risk assessment. Estimating ‘equivalence’ is now the process used to determine whether or not Australian products can penetrate foreign markets, and whether or not products produced abroad can penetrate Australian markets. This involves an appraisal of whether the imported product presents the same or lesser magnitude of human-health risk as posed by the domestic product. Under the guidelines produced by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the assessment of equivalence demands the conduct of a food safety risk assessment by the importing country. A country can deny the entry of a product if it fails to meet the equivalence standard. Thus exporting nations require a pool of scientific expertise to conduct their own risk assessments and also to appraise the appropriateness of those produced by their trading partners.

National

At the domestic level, state food safety legislation and food standards are increasingly based on the risk assessment approach. It is timely, therefore, for industry to (develop and) validate an integrated supply chain approach to food safety that has international standing as a basis for meeting public health and trade access requirements.

This project will provide an objective, transparent and scientifically robust basis for the management of food borne hazards and shelf life in the prawn industry. We propose to conform to the internationally accepted approach for the conduct of food safety risk assessment that is promulgated by CODEX, FAO and WHO (Anon., 2002).

Industry

This is an opportunity to work at all levels of the supply chain to ensure the safe reputation that SGWCPFA prawns enjoy is confirmed and maintained by validated quality systems. While the project develops and pre-tests a framework to validate the production of cooked prawns produced under the APPA Code it will provide industry with applied recommendations on the value of routine microbiological monitoring to support other audit verification processes.

Given AFMA’s need to satisfy its ESD objective, there is a need to consider uncertainty explicitly and identify performance indicators and harvest strategies that are as robust as possible to incorrect assumptions and misinformed interpretations of data. Use of these indicators and harvest strategies will improve the chances of achieving a reasonable balance between the conflicting objectives of long-term resource sustainability and the maximisation of economic gains.

The project also addresses to some extent two key research areas in subprogram (B) of the Wild Stock Program of the SCFA Research Committee: “Biological and socio-economic evaluation of alternative management scenarios for different species and categories of fishery to provide a framework for management planning” and “The evaluation and provision of harvest strategy models through comparison of management strategies using theory and case studies, establishing objective performance indicators for different jurisdictions and identifying options which are appropriate to the nature of the fishery”.

FRDC project 98/102 has already identified several areas where there is considerable uncertainty. However, that project has focussed on ‘generic’ data-poor species (although tailored to some extent to the actual situation for jackass morwong, pink ling, tiger flathead and spotted warehou, species that have been identified as ‘high' and 'medium' priority by SEFAG). Ideally, harvest strategy calculations should be tailored to particular species to achieve optimal outcomes. This project will evaluate harvest strategies for the four species that received initial focus in FRDC 98/102. FRDC 98/102 also focused on situations in which the fishery is based on a single gear-type only. However, it is increasingly being realised within SEFAG that even within the trawl sector there are sub-fleets, each of which differ substantially in terms of their selectivity. For example, for blue warehou, the trawl fleet off New South Wales has a selectivity pattern closer to that of the non-trawl fleet based at Lakes Entrance than that of the trawl fleet based in Portland.

One of AFMAs legislative objectives relates to providing cost-effective management. Increasingly industry is being expected to bear some of the costs associated with the monitoring on which stock assessments and hence TACs are based. There is therefore a need for an objective process for determining the trade-off between monitoring costs and the ability to which AFMAs management objectives are satisfied. The aim of this study is to examine this question within the scope of the trade-off between catch and risk.

Finally, there is a major need for stock assessment on more species in the SEF. However, although data for many species is poor, there are nevertheless fewer assessments than there could be due to a lack of software for conducting the increasingly complicated assessments demanded by stakeholders. FRDC 98/102 has developed software modules for implementing several commonly applied stock assessment methods (including “Integrated Analysis” – the basis for the current assessments for blue grenadier, school whiting, eastern gemfish, and blue warehou). If the detailed output from the software that implements these assessment methods could be available in an easily useable and visual form, this software could provide a better basis for conducting routine stock assessments.

The need for this project arises from a number of directions. Firstly, the Exmouth Gulf region of the fishery (Zone 1) is currently experiencing a very high exploitation rate. In a review of the Zone 1 fishery in 1997, a lack of knowledge of length-fecundity relationships and Natural Mortality rates for MOP was highlighted. As a result of a high exploitation rate, it was hypothesized that the flow through of recruits to the MOP stock may be less than the Natural Mortality Rate of the MOP stock, thus placing a long-term risk on the breeding population. Therefore research into MOP stock dynamics was identified to be of critical importance to maintaining the sustainability of the harvest regime in Zone 1.

Second, there is the long-term strategic need to find an alternative supply of large nuclei to counteract the declining source from the American Freshwater Mussel industry. In anticipation of demands for harvesting of MOP for nuclei, there is an urgent need to start gathering information, to enable a sustainable harvesting regime for MOP to be implemented in 3 years time. Most likely this will result in the setting of an appropriate quota for MOP, within the current TAC allocation mechanisms in zone 2 or 3 where MOP stocks have built up.

In order to implement sustainable harvesting, we need to address a number of uncertainties. First, what is the extent of MOP stocks with respect to overall numbers of pearl shell. Secondly, what are the rates of recruitment into, and natural mortality of, the MOP stocks. These data, combined with knowledge of stock size, particularly with reference to the culture shell, will enable rates of sustainable harvest to be estimated. Finally, what is the impact of harvesting of MOP on recruitment. Recently, for example, there is good evidence from catch rate data of increased recruitment at two spatially distinct areas, 80 Mile Beach and the Lacepede Islands. Whether this has been environmentally and/or stock driven is currently undetermined, although recent data suggests a considerable environmental factor in the central area (Zones 2/3) of the fishery.

Another identified strategy for sustainable management of MOP is relocation of MOP to better growth areas. Obviously the quality of MOP shell will determine the amount of nuclei which can be produced. There is some anecdotal information suggesting that MOP shell from different areas have different quality of shell, and there is the possibility that shell growth and quality may be improved by transplanting to these areas. Ultimately, after establishing the parameters for natural mortality, fecundity, and recruitment in MOP populations, there is the potential to undertake: a) a one-off, large-scale stock survey of MOP, and b) investigate the possibility of re-locating hatchery produced shell, after they have grown too large for culturing pearls, into areas to grow to a suitable MOP size.