Greenpeace New Zealand Weblog

Life in the ocean is not as serene as it seems according to two news reports this week.

A marine scientist at Auckland university, who has been eavesdropping on fish says he has proof that they “talk” to each other. Meanwhile, in the North Atlantic a new study suggests whales are shouting to be heard in ever noisier ocean waters.

What’s going on? And are these phenomena connected? One thing is for sure – there’s been a lot happening topside recently giving them plenty of reason for deep sea discussions. Read more »

The vast majority of the world’s internationally traded seafood moves by sea.  Many unfortunate fish find themselves ripped out of the ocean only to be gutted, frozen, shoveled into containers, and sent plowing across the top of it in a massive cargo vessel.  The companies that transport seafood from port to port play an indescribably important role in the seafood industry’s chain of custody.  After all, if you can’t get a fish onto the land, it becomes a lot tougher to put it in the oven.

It is in this respect that the imperiled Chilean sea bass – or more appropriately, the Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish – have recently gained an enormous ally. Read more »

I love it when a plan comes together.

Today we stepped up the pressure on Foodtown to get serious about putting in place a policy that would ensure it will only sell truly sustainable seafood.

We’ve just returned from the Quay St Foodtown in downtown Auckland where two of our activists hung a large banner above the front entrance of the store. The seven metre long banner was painted in the Foodtown blue and white and we used the same font so it appeared that today their company motto was ‘Foodtown costing us our oceans?’

Last week we attempted to attach a much longer banner with the same message on the hull of an orange roughy bottom trawler which we’d chained to the wharf in Auckland to stop it leaving port. That one didn’t go quite as planned because the fisherman on board managed to wrestle it from us before it was fully unraveled. Read more »

Sustainable pole and line tuna available in supermarkets in the UK. Currently the main New Zealand retailers have no policies in place to ensure the seafood they sell is sustainable, and many species fished and sold here are not sustainable.

Our fishing industry is doing us a disservice. As a small nation that relies on our primary industries and exports, we want to see New Zealand products flying off the shelves because they reflect genuinely sustainable practices that match our clean green reputation. Instead, we are seeing more and more New Zealand products being taken off shelves because they are failing to meet the sustainability demands of consumers and retailers in our export markets.
Recent announcements include that by Compass Group USA, the leading food service company in North America, of their sustainable seafood purchasing initiative. Over three years, Compass Group has taken 1.5 million pounds of unsustainable seafood off their catalogues – including orange roughy. This is a clear signal to the New Zealand fishing industry, which continues to catch and export orange roughy even though three of the eight stocks have collapsed and the Australian Government has declared it a threatened species.

This week Wegmans, a major US supermarket chain, has also taken orange roughy off their shelves. If our fishing industry had not yet got the message, Wegman’s statement should leave no room for doubt about the need to pick up our game: Read more »