Page 7 - Food Service Magazine March 2019
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CSIRO says commercial fishing stocks in Australia are not in decline
A 2018 PAPER THAT CLAIMED FISH STOCKS HAD DECLINED BY 31 PER CENT IN 10 YEARS HAS BEEN DEBUNKED.
Queensland fish-and- chip shop forced to close after backlash against name
The Battered Wife fish-and-chip shop in northern Queensland has been forced to close after owner Carolyn Kerr received criticism for her business name.
In November 2018, Kerr was met with a flood of comments on social media calling
the Innisfail restaurant name “disgusting”. Queensland MPs also voiced their outrage, including Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath who said, “That business is completely out of step with what [the] community’s expectations are”.
Kerr, who says she is a former police officer, claimed that she has experience domestic violence and hoped the business name would raise awareness. She told the ABC: “I’ve been around domestic violence ... and I found myself in a situation where I was in that as well and I just thought ‘you know, it’s my little stand to try to make awareness’.”
Kerr posted a tearful video to social media in which she explained that the closure was due to being “the subject of an abusive witch-hunt”.
She also claimed that anti-abuse organisations had threatened to throw bricks through the window, which has handwritten text that reads: “The only battering anyone need know :)”
She also spoke of complaints of “child exploitation” that were filed with Fair Work, and said that an impending audit was the main reason she decided to close, because of the financial strain.
“Last week I was informed that anonymous complaints were made to Department of Fair Work, who are now acting on it and doing an audit on my business,” Kerr said in the video.
“I believed that I had audit insurance like any small business should have, but I was informed this morning that it actually only covers tax audits and not Fair Work — I just can’t see any way that I can trade my
way through it.” The tops
comments on Kerr’s video are in support, shaming these organisations for causing a small- business owner such “pain”.
The University of Tasmania’s 2018 “Edgar paper”, a study that claimed Australia’s commercial fishing stocks had declined
by 31 per cent over the last 10 years, has been debunked by CSIRO senior research scientist of Oceans & Atmosphere Richard Little.
“The ‘Edgar paper’ caused significant stress to Australia’s commercial fishers and was widely used to try to discredit Australia’s sound fisheries management and influence political debate,” says Seafood Industry Association CEO Jane Lovell.
Little rejected the claims in the
Edgar paper, saying that the broader examination of Australian fisheries involved analytical deficiencies and factual errors.
Little wrote: “In Australia, for example, catches of one of Australia’s most valuable finfish fisheries (blue grenadier) decreased by more than 50% from 2013 to 2016. The large reduction in this Marine Stewardship Council‐certified fishery can be attributed to a single vessel not fishing, and not a decline in abundance.”
SIA issued a statement saying Australia’s professional fishers adhere
to strict regulations and monitoring to ensure we maintain healthy stocks.
“Let us be clear, Australia’s commercial fish-stocks are not in decline. In fact,
for the fifth consecutive year Australia’s Commonwealth-managed fisheries have been listed as not subject to over-fishing by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences. This is something our wild-catch fishers are very proud of, and is unprecedented internationally,” says Lovell.
Despite these findings, commercial fish- stocks are in decline globally. In 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations published that global fish consumption had increased by 67 per cent in the last 50 years. The World Economic Forum also reported that “nearly 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are now fully exploited, (i.e. maximally sustainably fished) overexploited or depleted,” with
61 per cent being “fully fished” and 29 per cent “over fished”.
It’s clear that chefs and consumers should be looking to source sustainable seafood, from sustainable farms or caught on a line.


































































































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