reLAKSation 300. Callander McDowell
Thank you: When we first started to write and publish the reLAKSation viewsletter about five years ago, we could not have foreseen how popular and well-read it would become. We certainly would not have envisaged that it would have continued for three hundred issues. reLAKSation was first intended as a marketing tool for Callander McDowell but has developed far beyond this aim. For this, we would like to thank all our readers for their continued support.
Toilet manners: According to Seafoodintelligence.com, the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CARR) has stepped up pressure on US grocery retailer Safeway to stop selling farmed salmon by placing an advertisement in Sunday’s New York Times. The ad plays off Safeway’s ‘Ingredients for Life’ branding with the theme ‘Ingredients for Extinction’. CARR hopes that the ads will pressurise the aquaculture industry to clean up its act by moving from cages to closed containment production. The ad relies on the usual tactics employed by these blinkered environmental groups to state their case. These are supposed to deter consumers from buying farmed salmon by creating yet another unfounded food scare story. They resort to destabilising the food sector because no one else is interested in hearing what they have to say.
It is really not worth responding to CARR’s claims but one of their assertions can be put into context by consideration of another item of news published recently in the UK’s Times newspaper. The CARR advert claims that thousands of tonnes of raw fish faeces are released directly into the oceans. Really! Does CARR believe that the many millions of fish in the sea all climb out onto land to defaecate or would they agree that every fish simply just does it straight into the sea? Millions of tonnes of fish waste are deposited throughout the worlds’ oceans as part of the natural balance.
The Times newspaper recently reported that pollution levels at over 100 British beaches fails to come up to standards set by the European Union. Two beaches fail to even meet the legally binding minimum standards. The level of pollution is so high due to sewage and agricultural effluent that there is a one in seven chance that bathers will catch a stomach bug. Despite a massive investment in sewage treatment, raw or semi-filtered sewage is still pumped into the sea at seventy three British beaches. All the sewage from 250,000 inhabitants of Brighton pours straight out of a pipe about a mile out to sea, washing ashore in some weathers. In addition, the Environment Agency estimates that one in five homes is not connected to mains sewers with waste going into septic tanks or rain water run offs that often flow into rivers and out to sea.
This is untreated or partially treated human waste as well as high nitrogen run-off from agricultural farms. And CARR is concerned about a bit of fish waste that is naturally found in the sea!!!
One of the beaches highlighted in the Times article is Hastings on the British Kent coast. Hastings is also the focus of a herring and mackerel fishery which has been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Could it be that one of the reasons why this fishery is so sustainable is that it is sustained by this effluent loading. CARR would have us refuse farmed salmon because of the waste they generate but surely that is much more desirable than have the fish swim around in a sea of human waste!!!
What a waste!: As EU taxpayers, we at Callander McDowell would certainly like to question the European Commission as to the amount of money being spent on the current review of the EU’s antidumping measures. According to IntraFish, the European Commission announced that it wanted to investigate just six companies accounting for 60% of Norway’s salmon production. The Norwegian Seafood Federation have countered this selection and have proposed a number of changes which they say will make the investigation more ’representative’ of Norway’s salmon industry. Whatever the outcome of these negotiations, the European Commission appears to want to look at the companies’ books in detail going back three or four years. We cannot understand why. The EU’s antidumping measures came into effect in January 2006, just over 18 months ago. Before then has already been consigned to the history books since the salmon industry had long recovered from the 2003 dip in prices, the period during which the EUSPG claimed Norway had dumped salmon into the EU market.
The high price of salmon during 2006 supported by the financial results of many Norwegian companies clearly shows that Norway has not been dumping salmon into the EU (if it ever was). The majority of EUSPG members have now converted to organic production, which falls outside the remit of the current review. The outcome no longer affects them, whatever the European Commission decides. This review is not just a waste of time it is also a gross abuse of tax-payers money. Why pay for a review of the time period covered by the original investigation? The European Commission should simply drop the trade measures, resolve to never again get embroiled in a salmon dispute and let the salmon industry get on with producing a value for money and healthy food for European consumers.
If the remnants of the EUSPG disagree, let them stand up and say so.
What you see…: Paul Aandahl, a market analyst with the Norwegian Seafood Export Council told IntraFish that the recent nosedive in salmon prices is a passing phase and the market will rebound by autumn. He may well be right, but equally he may not. Salmon prices traditionally dipped during the summer months only to recover in the run up to Christmas however in recent years, the rule book appears to have been thrown out of the window and such traditional price developments are no longer guaranteed. The IntraFish price graphs for the last few years show that salmon prices could move either way.
Mr Aandahl suggests that Norwegian salmon have thrived in warmer waters and have reached harvest size much earlier than planned. This has boosted harvest volumes causing prices to fall. He expects that harvest volumes will start to fall as these larger fish are removed from the biomass reducing pressure on prices. We can only wait and see.
Mr Aandahl also told IntraFish that the large quantities of fish despatched to Europe were very much satisfying a market demand for salmon. He said that he had just returned from France where he saw that fresh salmon was doing a great trade in the shops there. By coincidence, we too have just returned from France where we conducted our regular survey of the retail sector visiting just shy of 30 separate supermarkets belonging to 13 different chains. Our view is a little different to that of Mr Aandahl. Whilst we cannot dispute the Norwegian export figures, we did not really see evidence of a buoyant trade in salmon. If anything, the reverse was true. Fresh fish counters which were once dominated by a sea of pink now offer a diversity of species, none of which stand out as a consumer favourite. The huge walls of smoked salmon offerings have shrunk to just a few different choices. The use of salmon in recipe dishes has declined leaving just one or two varieties and finally, the freezers contain little in the way of salmon products. There is a noticeable decline in the presence of salmon across the whole retail sector. It could be argued that it is because salmon is in such demand that its presence has diminished but we would counter this with the view that it is only since prices increased that salmon lost its dominance of the supermarket shelves.
We cannot explain this discrepancy. Mr Aandahl is sure that salmon exports have grown. We are equally sure that salmon is not finding its way to the supermarket shelves. We have argued before that high prices have become a deterrent to consumer purchases. This is what we’ve seen both in France and the UK. Perhaps the reality is that the traditional markets have stagnated whilst salmon has been directed into newer alternative markets which have not grown accustomed to paying lower prices for salmon purchases. Of course, we would be happy to be proved wrong since it will show that the traditional markets can still grow against a background of rising prices.