Aquaculture offers huge potential

Greenshell mussels, Pacific oyster and King Salmon dominate New Zealand's sea-based aquaculture industry but waiting in the wings are other species including kingfish and sea cucumber which may be farmed in the ocean and on land.
A kingfish farm is proposed on land near Katikati and a joint venture between Chinese aquaculture company Oriental Ocean and the Whakatohea Maori Trust Board will see extensive land and ocean aquaculture operations established at Opotiki, including growing sea cucumber.
It took adventurous pioneers to launch aquaculture in New Zealand, initially growing oysters and greenshell mussels, but before the early 1990s and the establishment of the Resource Management Act, it was mainly a cottage industry with individuals or small companies using their ingenuity and a lot of trial and error to produce commercial crops.
Today mussel farming is big business, and there are well-established oyster farms in Northland, Coromandel, Bay of Plenty and Marlborough with king salmon farms in Canterbury and Southland.
In 2008 aquaculture earned $265 million in export dollars but the industry body Aquaculture New Zealand has a goal of growing that to $1 billion by 2025.
Dr Andrew Morgan, aquaculture scientist at the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, is among those who believe New Zealand is poised for the next big step in its role as a major producer of sustainable, value added high quality seafood for the world.
"Some people are afraid aquaculture will do to the ocean what farming has in some places done to the land but that won't happen in New Zealand because of the stringent requirements of the Resource Management Act," he said.
"You can't grow a nice edible raw shellfish in dirty water."
The often maligned RMA ensures New Zealand doesn't repeat the mistakes of other nations when it comes unsustainable coastal to aquaculture practices.
"In China they grow sea cucumber in ponds over vast areas using extensive low technology and cheap labour, with associated environmental effects.
"We not only don't have the land area to do that, but our regulations wouldn't let it happen in New Zealand.
"That means we have to develop ways of growing commercial quantities of animals in much smaller areas, without impacting on the environment."
And that says Andrew, is entirely possible. Properly run coastal and sea-based aquaculture facilities shouldn't have adverse environmental impacts, nor should those offshore.
However, concerns about what impacts marine farms may have on the sea were among the reasons a moratorium was placed on the development of industry in 2002.
Writing in the industry publication Aquaculture New Zealand, Andrew said that during the 1990s, demand for space for new farms steeply increased raising issues for decision-makers and the environment, as well as applicants.
"The application process was choked, decisions were being made on insufficient information and there was a two-fold cost to applicants," he said.
After a decade of law changes and legal battles," the industry is finally gathering momentum and is close to moving forward once again. It will make a major contribution to the economy and sustainable economic development into the future.
"This will be achieved by freeing up access to identified coastal space and creating an enabling environment in which to invest in and carry out aquaculture."
While New Zealand still has reasonable stocks of fish, thanks to its 200km exclusion economic zone, neither New Zealand nor other nations can continue to take fish from the sea indefinitely in the volumes they have.
The answer to feeding a world hungry for fish and the protein and the health benefits many species have to offer is to ranch and farm them to order, he believes.
With this in mind the joint venture proposed at Opotiki with land based and offshore farms will have significant benefits for the whole Bay of Plenty.
"It won't just bring employment and new investment to Opotiki, it will also benefit the rest of the region which could become like Port Stephens in Australia.
"Tauranga is one of the few cities in the country which has the combination of a deep water port, an airport, and excellent road transport systems to enable it to export fresh seafood to the world."
The region's infrastructure, including the port, were built initially for the forestry and coal industries but in recent decades new industries like kiwifruit and tourism have benefited and next in line appears to be seafood.
NZ AQUACULTURE
0.02 per cent of coastline taken up by aquaculture
15,800 ha of allocated water space
43 per cent near shore
57 per cent in open ocean
15 per cent NZ seafood export revenue comes from aquaculture
66 per cent of production exported to 72 countries
$265 million earned by industry in 2008
$1 billion earning the aim by 2025
85 million tonnes of seafood predicted to be consumed by the world by 2015
(Source Aquaculture NZ)