At the time of writing in March 2026, the conflict in the Middle East has meant challenges for businesses, including those of you in the fishing industry, particularly with the rapid increases in fuel prices. – By Dan Bolger | Deputy Director General, Fisheries New Zealand
As we continue to navigate these impacts, I encourage you get in touch with us about how this is affecting your business. We’re committed to keeping the sector updated and working with you to navigate any volatility. You can find information and updates on the Ministry for Primary Industries’ (MPI) website under ‘Support for food and fibre exporters during the Middle East conflict 2026’.
Here at Fisheries New Zealand (FNZ), innovation is an important part of both how we work and how we support the fishing industry.
Our processes for assessing fish stocks are well-established and provide a solid scientific basis for decision-making. But these can involve lengthy and manual processes, sometimes taking 18 months or more to complete. In some fisheries, this means we can miss opportunities to adjust limits, especially where we see rapid changes in abundance.
Every day, commercial fishers provide electronic catch and position data, giving timely insight into what is happening on the water. This data, combined with other environmental indicators, gives us insight that can be used to manage our fisheries more actively. We are investing in tools that help us quickly analyse trends in fleet behaviour, bycatch, seasonal patterns and more. With the right controls in place, this can feed directly into decisions on catch limits and help tighten the relationship between abundance and catch limits.
A good example of this shift is a recently commissioned project to automate updates of ‘catch per unit of effort’ (CPUE) metrics. Through automation and in-housing, we can
avoid some of the manual processes and associated costs of traditional approaches. This provides a scalable model to give routine insight across more stocks than is possible today.
This wealth of information speeds up our ability to identify what’s happening within a fishery and spot opportunities for improvement, whether that’s about allowing more use of the fishery or imposing necessary restrictions.
We’ve also been working with industry to support innovation in the sector. FNZ’s sector support and innovation team has met with many fishers over the past two years as part of regional and gear innovation workshops, together with Seafood New Zealand, the New Zealand Federation of Commercial Fishermen and Moana New Zealand.
The workshops have provided an opportunity for fishers to come together, share ideas and experiences, hear about innovations and things that affect their business, and raise
issues. An area of focus has been innovation in fishing approaches to support both economic and environmental performance. As part of this, attendees have heard from
Australian counterparts who presented on how they’re working with fishers on gear trials, training and funding for innovation.
If you are working on innovative ways to improve fishing methods and practices, you may wish to explore options available through MPI’s funding programmes to support your projects.
The Primary Sector Growth Fund (PSGF) provides support on a co-investment basis to help you innovate and achieve your goals faster. There’s also an option through Māori
agribusiness funding, which helps Māori landowners and agribusinesses achieve their goals, including Māori-owned fishing and seafood businesses.
The PSGF has co-funded some larger projects like the award-winning FloMo (previously Precision Seafood Harvesting) system, which is now in the stage of being operationalised within our inshore fisheries. Another is New Zealand King Salmon’s Blue Endeavour, which is a world-first in farming the King Salmon species in the open ocean.
Information about MPI’s funding programmes, including the application process and criteria is available on MPI’s website. FNZ’s sector support and innovation team can support you with advice and connections – you can contact them by email at [email protected].
Finally, the work underway to reform our fisheries management system to be more efficient and remove unnecessary obstacles to grow the fishing industry is progressing through the parliamentary process. I encourage you to provide feedback on the Fisheries Amendment Bill through the select committee processes.