Change needed to stay competitive: Fisheries Council
But change needed if Atlantic Canada to remain competitive: Fisheries Council chair
Seafood is the most traded food product in the world, and demand for it is expected to increase 7 to 9 per cent annually for the next 10 years, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO).
That presents a lot of opportunity for seafood producers in Atlantic Canada, says Carey Bonnell, chair of the Fisheries Council of Canada.
“An additional 40 million tonnes of aquatic food will be required by 2030, just to maintain demand,” Bonnell said during a St. John’s Board of Trade panel discussion last week, during the board’s annual outlook conference.
Bonnell, who has been vice-president of sustainability and engagement with Ocean Choice International since 2018, said East Coast seafood companies already have a bit of an edge in the global market with certification from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) www. msc.org, a global non-profit organization that works with fisheries, grocery stores and restaurants to make it easier for consumers to choose wild seafood that has come from sustainable fishing.
Canada, and Newfoundland and Labrador, are leading the world in certification through the MSC, Bonnell told the panel.
“Globally about 16 per cent of fisheries meet this standard. In Canada that percentage is much higher and in Newfoundland and Labrador virtually all of our fish stocks are MSC certified,” he told Saltwire.
It’s an onerous process to get MSC certification, he added, but seafood producers who can carry the blue fish label on their products have a competitive advantage.
Currently, Canadian producers export seafood to about 140 countries.
Seafood producers also proved agile during the pandemic, creating new products packaged for home cooks cruising the grocery store freezers.
However, Bonnell said to remain competitive against countries like Norway, Iceland and others in the seafood market, the mindset around seafood must change and federal and provincial governments must adapt their policies to focus on a marketbased approach, rather than a production-based approach. What does that mean? “We have to do as other countries, like Iceland and Norway, have done,” said Bonnell. “We have to move toward longer operating seasons, focused on value and key metrics like quality of employment per kilo of catch rather than on the number of people employed.
“Current government policies — federal and provincial — are still based on the old model of demographics,” he said, with a focus on the number of jobs that can be provided.
That’s not working anymore, he said, pointing out that seasonal operations are not enough to attract younger workers to the production lines to replace those workers that are reaching retirement age.
Innovation and technology will offer some of the solutions, he said, adding that more automation does not necessarily mean job loss.
Bonnell said better technology will lead to less labour-intensive work, efficiencies in production and longer work seasons as companies are able to gain a larger share of the global seafood market.
“We can’t compete with the low-cost labour in the industry in Asia … and we’re not yet sufficiently automated to compete with places like Norway and Iceland that have gone through the process of improving automation.
“But we are evolving in that direction and we have to continue to move toward it.”
Ultimately, he said, the focus has to be on producing what the market wants, not just dumping product into a market and expecting people will buy it.
To do it differently, producers and fish harvesters have to be aligned in their mindset around the process of serving up seafood to the world.
“We need a market-based approach that works back from what the market wants,” he said. That process means the first question is what and how do consumers want to eat seafood, and how do we build the value chain — from fishing to processing — to deliver?
Bonnell said the opportunity for growth in the seafood industry — for both production and fishing — is “absolutely tremendous.”
“We have the product and the opportunity. What we need to do now is make sure our value chain is aligned to take advantage of those opportunities.”