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Download AudioSealord chief executive Doug Paulin says a plan to lock up the majority of seamounts in the exclusive economic zone is a way to reassure the public about the sustainability of the company’s fishing practices.
Seamounts are volcanic cones rising from the seafloor which support abundant marine life.
Mr Paulin says just 15 of the 142 known seamounts over 1000 metres have been trawled, and the plan is to limit future activities to those established trawl tracks.
“One of the things we are trying to accomplish through this proposal is to give the New Zealand public that real transparency and safe that they know there are a number of these seamounts that are protected because, at the moment when I talk to people, they think we go anywhere and everywhere looking for fish and trawl pretty much any seamount that’s on the seafloor, which is far from the truth,” he says.
Mr Paulin says closing the seamounts, as some environmental groups are pushing for, would make large blocks of Māori fisheries settlement quota worthless.
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