Australian Northern Prawn Fishery

By Annie Jarrett, Chief Executive Officer of the Northern Prawn Fishing Industry Association (NPF Industry Pty Ltd)

“If you can believe it, I began working as a cook and deckhand on trawlers throughout the Northern Prawn Fishery and through this cast my lot into the fishing industry. This led to a life-long career working in the seafood industry and I now represent the owners of 52 boats within the Northern Prawn Industry Company.

Commercial fishing for Northern Prawn began in the early 1960s, and expanded quickly in the 1970s. From the 1970s onwards, the fishery suffered from too many licenses. By the mid-1980s we had 302 licenses in that fishery and declining stocks. Industry-funded buy-back schemes and compulsory acquisition of licenses reduced the number of licenses from 302 to 130 between 1986 and 1993. This was followed by further industry-funded capacity reduction between 2000 and 2005. A government funded buy out in 2006/07 further reduced capacity to 52 boats.

Since 1985, there has been around $150 million invested by the industry, making this one of the few examples worldwide where the industry has taken a lead role and paid for the majority of the restructuring process. It has taken 20 or 30 years, but we now have the fishery at a stage where the stocks are rebuilding and we are on track with our maximum economic yield (MEY) target. That, together with fewer boats, means that catches per vessel have increased substantially in the past four years and we are now able to withstand the fluctuations in profits caused by changes in stocks, prawn prices and fuel costs.

I won’t say that the decommissioning programme hasn’t been controversial and difficult for many in the industry, but we realised that something had to be done or the whole industry would collapse. We are quite unlike a number of fisheries around the world in the sense that we don’t have any explicit social objective and manage our fisheries to maximise economic yield. However, saying that, everyone leaving the fishery was financially compensated and those who remained have enjoyed the benefits that flow more broadly from a more profitable fishery.

By the mid-1990s the public started to be interested in issues of by-catch, and again we proved ourselves as a progressive fishery by developing a plan to minimise by-catch and improve the survivability of released species. One of the most significant measures has been the introduction of the seawater hopper that increases survival rates of discarded by-catch from 30-95%[1].

We’ve been lucky that we have had this partnership approach with the government and we’ve also had some strong leaders over the years. We set up a joint management advisory committee comprised of government, researchers and industry very early in the 1980s but have now got to a point where the industry is actually undertaking a number of functions on behalf of government. We are responsible for a voluntary crew member observer programme, which collects by-catch data, and for managing the catch and effort, and economic datasets.

There will always be people who believe that trawling is still too damaging. However, we trawl on areas of the seabed that have a soft muddy bottom, and while our fishing area covers 770,000km we only fish around 8% of this entire area, for a maximum of 6 and a half months of the year. We have done a great deal to minimise our footprint. We are very proud of our environmental performance in the Northern Prawn Fishery.”

Species: Brown tiger prawn (Penaeus esculentus); Grooved tiger prawn (P. semisulcatus); Blue endeavor prawn (Metapenaeus endeavouri); Red endeavor prawn (M. ensis); White Banana prawns (Fenneropenaeus merguiensis); Red legged banana prawns (Fenneropenaeus indicus)

Vital Statistics

Fishing methods: Twin, triple and quad otter trawl (with seawater hoppers to reduce by-catch)

Country: Australia

Ocean: Pacific                                                                                                  

Fishery tonnage: In 2010 tiger prawn catches were 1,628mt, endeavor prawn 429mt and banana prawn 5,642mt

Markets: Australia, Japan & China