Fishing quota system simplified

By ADAM GIFFORD

Commercial Fisheries Services or FishServe, a company set up by the Seafood Industry Council (SeaFIC), has almost completed a registry for the country's fisheries quota management system for the fishing year starting on October 1.

FishServe has been running the existing quota registry on contract for the Ministry of Fisheries since 1999.

Under the policy of devolution to industry contained in the Fisheries Act 1996, responsibility for the registry is passing to an "approved service delivery organisation," which SeaFIC is reorganising itself to become.

To implement the legislation, 80 per cent of FishServe's administration systems have had to be redesigned.

FishServe general manager Lesley Campbell said the overall cost of the project was $14 million, which would be paid by industry levies.

A big chunk of that will go to Deloitte Consulting, which is building the registry application.

Deloitte project manager David Cashmore said about 50 staff were working on the registry.

Analysis and design work started in May last year, and the first modules will need to go live by July 30.

The fundamental change is that quota owners will no longer need to lease quota they do not fish themselves. Instead, the ownership right and the fishing right have been split, and quota owners will be issued annual catch entitlement (ACE) that they can trade.

The penalty system has also been changed. If fishers net species for which they do not have ACE, they have more time to obtain enough to cover the catch.

"There is a multitude of ways people can use and manage quota, which makes managing the regime difficult," said Ms Campbell. "With ACE, it's a lot simpler."

From October, fishers will be able to do ACE transfers from a website or by file uploads, and furnish some returns electronically.

The old registry database was a Powerhouse application on the Digital (now Compaq) Open VMS platform running on an Alpha server. It was built around the 1983 legislation, which came into force in 1986.

The replacement is written in Visual Basic in an SQL Server database on the Windows 2000 platform, running on Compaq servers.

Mr Cashmore said that because there were only about 3000 active fishers and a relatively stable amount of quota, the database did not need to be hugely expandable.

"At the same time it's the hub of an industry which is worth $1.3 billion a year," he said. "It manages their property rights."

From August the system will handle vessel registrations. On October 1, fishers will use it to check their ACE entitlements and make any changes of ownership. At the end of the month they will say how much they caught, and the numbers will be tallied.

If there is a shortfall, fishers will be charged a deemed value and their fishing permit will be suspended if they do not pay within 20 days.

If by the end of the fishing year they do not have enough ACE to cover all the catch, they will be charged an annual deemed value at a higher rate.

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NZ Seafood Industry
FishServe