Marine sustainability is a matter of location

Does such labelling foster responsible consumerism or is it a farcical marketing tool?

Created and promoted by the Australian Marine Conservation Society, the popular Sustainable Seafood Guide uses traffic-light colour coding to identify what it deems the best fish to eat. Green is for better choice, amber for think twice, and red means say no.

But the labelling system has inherent problems. Marine biologist and commercial fishing supporter Nick Ruello says the system is flawed because it doesn't look at individual fisheries, some of which are sustainable even though the species might not be in other places.

Ruello has a point. Well managed boutique fisheries can harvest things such as school prawns from an estuary by hand while the same species caught elsewhere by trawlers results in unacceptable by-catch.

Indeed, by-catch is a big issue haunting the popular Marine Stewardship Council labelling system.

The global body has come under fire for awarding an eco-label for sustainable fishing to the north-west Atlantic longline swordfish fishery in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Conservation groups including the Sea Turtle Conservancy, the David Suzuki Foundation and Oceana have challenged the merits of its eco-labelling because the aforesaid longline fishery apparently captures five times more non-target animals than swordfish each year.

While labelled sustainable and well managed, the Canadian longline fishery captures 20,000 swordfish at a cost of 100,000 sharks and 1400 sea turtles annually. Which is to say nothing of the seabirds dragged asunder on baited hooks.

Closer to home, hoki (blue grenadier) is sold in our supermarkets from supposedly sustainable fisheries in New Zealand. But, after being landed, the fish is shipped to China to be processed before being transported back to New Zealand to be sold in McDonald's fish burgers.

So, some fisheries might be sustainable on one level but morally indefensible due to high transport and/or carbon costs. Not all aquaculture gets the nod or tick, either. Prawn farms in Asia are gross polluters.

If you need to buy fish, look to farmed salmon or leatherjackets, bream, whiting and blue-swimmer crabs caught from the wild.

Better still, most of it you can catch in your own backyard.

Meanwhile, long-range fishers have been taking their tight bag limit of two gemfish a day from Browns Mountain off the NSW coast, where mako sharks are almost as common.

Although the yellowfin and bluefin tuna have gone AWOL, the current looks good just north of Broken Bay. There might even be an early-season striped marlin about.

A Sydney boat recently sighted one in the wide, blue yonder.

The jigging brigade has been scoring kingfish to 10 kilograms off the central coast and, word has it, the fish have moved to the close reefs and headlands. A few bonito have joined them, along with thumper trevally.

Big schools of Aussie salmon are working along the Sydney coast, with a few striped tuna a tad further out.

Reef fishers are taking snapper and morwong in 40 to 50 metres.

Flathead are the easy target on the drifts, some charter fishers saying the fish have gone mad.

Using a two-hook rig, they've been taking double headers on just about every drop.

Beach fishers are taking tailor with the dusk.

But the whiting and bream are better in the estuaries, where the lure fishing has suddenly sprung into life.

There are flathead and flounder on the flats and some small jewfish around the bridges.

Harbour guide Stuart Reid has been scoring terrific catches of flathead and morwong in 50 metres.

He also reports taking plenty of Aussie salmon and trevally from the big schools parked between the Heads and big catches of luderick from the Sow and Pigs.

I saw big whiting off Castle Rock and anglers in both Botany Bay and Port Hacking landed some beauties last week.

david.lockwood@bigpond.com

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