reLAKSation 20.
Consumer Choice or Consumer Confusion: A friend claimed that she had bought wild salmon for only £6.59/kg from her local supermarket this week. Further investigation revealed that the fish were the first of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified Alaskan salmon to appear in the UK and not wild Atlantic salmon as our friend had believed.
It was easy to see how this confusion arose. The only indication that the fish were imported from Alaska was the MSC gill tag. As no Atlantic salmon were displayed, consumers would naturally think that these were exactly the same fish as they had previously bought. In this case it was the store's fault for not providing adequate labelling, although the assistant did know that they were Alaskan Keta salmon, after being asked. However, there is clearly a possibility for confusion amongst consumers who have no idea of the difference between Atlantic and Pacific salmon and farmed and wild.
With many chefs extolling the virtues of wild salmon, the salmon farming industry may have a difficult job in the weeks ahead. This will be made harder by the fact that the MSC, supported by their partners, the WWF, will be promoting the benefits of buying salmon from the MSC's sustainable fisheries. The MSC argue that consumers should change their eating habits to help reduce the pressure on threatened stocks of the most popular species. Instead, they recommend consumers should eat more species such as saithe, pollack, mackerel, which have lost their popularity. In addition, they also recommend that consumers buy fish, which come from supposedly sustainable certified fisheries, such as those in Alaska.
Of more concern is the fact that MSC partners, the WWF have advocated that consumers should support the concept of eating wild, rather than farmed fish. Should the MSC be able to maintain a continued supply of Alaskan salmon into Europe, then the farming industry may find it is not just the environment lobby that they have to face, but also that in support of sustainable fisheries?
However, in this case, the question must be asked about the environmental morals of importing fresh fish from the other side of the world, when locally produced fish is readily available?
Yet, the final choice will remain with the consumer. In the very short term, consumer may opt for the wild fish, but it is farmed salmon, which will win their overall support. This is just not because of a more competitive price, but more importantly, a question of taste.
A Global Market: For several years, Callander McDowell have suggested that European salmon producers should consider the possibility that they may face the direct competition from salmon imported from outside Europe. This view has been readily dismissed as being improbable, due to the high cost of air freight, but improbable or not, fresh Alaskan salmon has now started to appear in some of the major supermarkets.
Yet, this MSC certified salmon is not the first time imported fresh salmon has appeared in the UK market. Back in 1991, several tonnes of Chilean salmon appeared in the British wholesale market and this could have continued had Chilean exporters being tempted by a potentially more lucrative US marketplace. Four years later, one leading supermarket group promoted fresh Coho salmon and for the last couple of years, one importer has been gaining more and more supermarket shelf space with previously frozen Pacific salmon.
However, the UK market has had an even longer association with imported Pacific salmon. For many years, Pacific salmon was imported to feed the London based smoking houses, a trade which only declined with the increased availability of farmed local fish. Yet, the biggest trade in Pacific salmon continues even today with imports of about 25,000 tonnes of tinned salmon coming into the UK every year.
The farming industry has always dismissed these imports are being irrelevant as they are not competitive to fresh salmon. However, what is changing is that the salmon market is becoming more internationalised and the differences between fresh Atlantic and tinned Pacific are narrowing. The salmon industry might believe there is a difference, but to many consumers who remain ignorant of the variety of species, salmon is just salmon.
Small Fry: The various news services have all reported the work of PhD student Jan Ove Evjemo of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Dr Evjemo has suggested that the fledgling Norwegian marine fish farming industry has lagged behind their counterparts in the Mediterranean. He recommends that Norwegian producers of cod and halibut should adopt year round production methods used to grow sea bass and sea bream. He estimates that production of fry could be increased many times over if Norwegian farmers were willing to grow their own live food instead of harvesting it from the wild.
Unfortunately, whilst Dr Evjemo's proposals may result in increased production, they will also help increase the cost of the resultant fry. The greatest obstacle to the production of all marine species is the high cost of raising fry until they are large enough to consume manufactured feed. This is just as valid to the successful Mediterranean species as it is to cod and halibut. It is not such a problem whilst the price of the market fish remains high, but with increased production, market prices will fall. The cost of production must therefore be reduced, but it may prove extremely difficult to do this for marine species produced in cost intensive hatcheries. A news item in Intrafish on the same day as the report about Dr Evjemo describes the problems experienced by French producers faced with cheaper imports from Greece.
The only solution is that the cost of production of marine fish fry needs to be reduced. Live food production is not the answer. Instead, alternative methods of feeding young fry need to be investigated. Micro-encapsulation may be one way forward, but if no solution is forthcoming, the vision of farmed cod being produced in the same sort of quantities as farmed salmon, may be just a little optimistic.