I would like to thank Shelley Scoullar and the Speak Up group for raising the issue of carp, and the Pastoral Times for giving it prominence in last week’s edition (‘Carp problem needs sorting’, Tuesday, October 14).
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was conceived and introduced with the intention of restoring balance to water use - seeking a fair and equitable approach between consumptive and environmental water.
This letter does not attempt to debate the broader merits of the plan; rather, it highlights one of its most significant unintended consequences.
Any change to water management on the scale of the Basin Plan was always going to produce unforeseen outcomes.
It was never realistic to expect an environmental nirvana. However, the proliferation of carp — as raised in the recent article — stands as a clear manifestation of one of the plan’s most damaging environmental legacies.
The altered flow regimes and management strategies have, in many areas, created ideal conditions for this invasive species to thrive, at the expense of native fish and overall river health.
Charlie Carp was established in an effort to address this very issue, and since the inception of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, Charlie Carp, Garry Warwick in South Australia, and a small number of dedicated fishers remain the only groups to have removed any meaningful quantities of carp from the river system.
Their efforts demonstrate that practical, solution-based intervention is possible, yet they also highlight the absence of coordinated support to tackle what has become a widespread environmental problem.
Access to carp is the single most difficult and costly issue Charlie Carp has had to contend with.
It has directly affected the company’s financial performance and its ability to remain competitive in both domestic and export markets.
Without reliable and affordable access to fish, production volumes, efficiency, and pricing all suffer - limiting the company’s capacity to grow and to deliver on the environmental outcomes it was originally established to achieve.
There are practical and engineered commercial solutions available to remove large numbers of carp from our river systems and to address the issues that have been raised.
Over the years, we have received numerous approaches from private water schemes, and we have the capacity to create carp-free water sources and carp-controlled zones.
While this will not eliminate the problem entirely, it would mark the beginning of a structured, quantifiable, and commercially sustainable process to reduce carp populations across the basin.
We need the support of both state and federal governments to achieve this outcome.
Put simply, we require access to the sites and, critically, security of tenure over them in order to develop and install the infrastructure necessary to remove carp.
In practical terms, we cannot justify investing funds in land or assets where we do not have secure, long-term tenure.
It shouldn’t be that hard.
Yours etc.
Harold Clapham
Director, Charlie Carp Ltd
18°C