reLAKSation 218.
Wild
– no, just furious:
There’s an old joke about salmon, being served in a restaurant. The customer
asks the waiter whether the salmon was wild. The reply, no but when it was
caught, it was furious. IntraFish reported this week that Fritz-Harald Wenig was
furious when he received the Norwegian reply to his recent hearing statement. In
this, Mr Wenig had recommended that a permanent 2.80 MIP be imposed for the next
five years. In reply, the Norwegians have threatened to take a new appeal to the
WTO and contest the previous high dumping duties imposed on some Norwegian
companies before an EU tribunal. Mr Wenig had thought that the Norwegians had
given up their demand for free trade with the EU and that the matter was
settled.
We,
at Callander McDowell, believe that Mr Wenig has no right to be furious. This
salmon dumping case is not a game, it is about livelihoods, business and
consumer needs. Equally, is Norway’s response a reflection on Mr Wenig’s
ability, capability or personality. Mr Wenig is an EU civil-servant and as such
he needs to accept that Norway is entitled to fight what it considers to be
injustice. Their reply is simply another attempt to seek fairness and in this
salmon dumping case, fairness appears to have been in short supply.
We
know that DG Trade have conducted their investigation and consider that they
have uncovered evidence of dumping which requires punishment. However, there are
so many unanswered questions which DG Trade either cannot or will not answer
that there must be some doubt about the validity of the findings. We, at
Callander McDowell, certainly have not been satisfied by DG Trade’s answers to
many questions that we would argue that the whole case should be independently
reviewed. If DG Trade believe that their case is watertight then they should be
happy to be exposed to public scrutiny. Fury is more of the expected response
when someone has something to hide.
Fear
not:
Matthias Keller, a spokesman for the German seafood industry told IntraFish that
he feared a that a new salmon crisis could develop in 2006/7. This was because
he believes that higher prices will encourage producers to put more fish to sea,
leading to a repeat of previous over-production and further EU trade measures.
Mr Keller already believes that the EU’s antidumping measures have not worked
because they have cost more jobs in Germany alone than they have saved in
Scotland. German VAP processing is down 30% half year on year as high prices
have forced processing to countries offering lower cost production. In addition,
that production still remaining in Germany is increasingly sourcing from Chile
to keep prices down.
We,
at Callander McDowell, are not convinced that Norway is over-producing since
market demand for salmon will continue to rise as long as it is available at a
price consumers are willing to pay. The problem is not over-production, but
rather under-marketing and we don’t mean advertising and promotion but rather
understanding what consumers actually want. This the sole reason why independent
Scottish producers have asked Brussels for help. They don’t know what they are
producing or why. Sadly, this has meant that producers have become too busy
fighting these trade issues to invest their time and resources in proper
marketing. They are not helped by the fact that the dumping cases do more to
disrupt the balance of the marketplace than any so called over-production. The
only way that this can be redressed is a full return to free trade so allowing
the market to find its own balance.
Ethical
stance:
Columnist Martin Samuels, writing in ‘The Times’
(www.timesonline.co.uk )
commented on a photograph that appeared in one of the Sunday newspapers. This
was of Manchester United and England footballer Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend,
Colleen McLoughlin taken when she was out shopping. This was nothing new as
Colleen has a reputation for her shopping, having being stopped at Manchester
airport for exceeding the £145 limited on imported goods by a mere £39,855. As
Martin Samuels writes ‘Colleen Shops’ is hardly big news. The story was
where she shopped. Unlikely to be ever seen in High Street stores like H Samuel
(jewellers) or British Home Stores (cheap department store) Ms McLoughlin was
snapped coming out of a Kwik Save store. For the uninitiated , Kwik Save is
owned by Somerfield and is the UK’s version of discount stores, Aldi, Lidl and
Netto. Mr Samuels suggests that the only reason why Colleen would frequent Kwik
Save was not to find the latest designer label but that she was on the lookout
for cheap food, which would bring her neatly inline with the rest of modern
Britain, ‘a nation dribbling mass-produced ready meals down its designer tops.
A population of bleeding hearts that wants animals to be treated ethically but
would rather eat a tin of condemned veal than put 2p/kg on a packet of
drumsticks’.
Martin
Samuels also writes that little Britain had a collective seizure last week
because TV chef, Jamie Oliver, was seen to slaughter a lamb on prime time
television. He was staying with a family of hunters in the Le Marche region of
Italy and was asked to help kill a lamb for dinner. Mr Samuels wrote that there
was nothing gratuitous in the scene, the weirdness was in the public reaction.
Modern society prefers to keep reality TV unreal, however the main objection was
that Jamie did not stun the animal first reflecting Britain’s attitude to food
production. The reality is that ethical treatment of animals is just chatter
when Britain stubbornly resists paying a fair price for its food. The fact that
chicken is cheaper today than it was twenty years ago has not been achieved by
free range or organic farming. Mr Samuels points out that you can have cheap
food or ethical food but what you can’t have is cheap ethical food.
There
is a view that organic food is on the rise in the UK, but 70% of organic onions
come from abroad. Tesco imports 50% of its organic pork and Asda 23%. Almost
half the organic food sold in Britain is now of foreign origin. This makes for
cheap labour, cheap overheads and posh
food at Kwik Save prices. As a result, organic food is now beginning to sell.
Yet, the Soil Association complain that much of it comes from countries with
poor animal welfare standards.
Martin
Samuels says that the future Mrs Rooney may have only shopped in Kwik save for
cheap booze but the reality is that however many surveys are conducted to
confirm how concerned the consumer is about ethical production, most British
consumers prefer to pay less, not more for the food they eat. Perhaps, this is
why salmon companies, like Loch Duart Salmon that trade on their ethical
production, believe that the only way to gain market access is to do so through
the services of DG Trade and hence why they subscribe to the EUSPG.