Shellfish

Reasons to be cheerful

It is always encouraging to be able to start off with good news and that has come in various forms recently. At the Crown Estate’s Marine Aquaculture Awards, not only were shellfish industry members nominated in various categories but we also produced some winners from within our ranks!

Scottish Shellfish Marketing Group walked off with the award for Aquaculture Seafood Product of the Year for their new range of mussels ready-meal products for Lidl, while in the Community Initiative category Seafood Shetland was awarded for their venture designed to demonstrate the value of the seafood industry to Shetland.

‘So Much to Sea’ provides links to all aspects of an industry that is worth £300 million a year to the islands and surpasses the value of the oil, gas, agriculture, tourism, and creative industries combined.Fax:

Well done to all for keeping our sector in the headlines for all the right reasons.

Equally impressive were the 2014 production survey results from Marine Scotland: mussel production up 14 per cent year on year and king scallops up by 20 per cent. Expansion help available

Help is at hand with a range of organisations aligned to encourage the expansion of our sector. We have high level support from the EU with their ‘Blue Growth’ strategy and a range of other strategic visions which view aquaculture production as the primary route of increasing employment and meeting increasing demand for seafood.

Extremely importantly, such aspirations are matched by hard cash with the long awaited European Marine and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) creeping forward to a point where the UK Operational Programme can be agreed by the EU Commission and calls for funding actually issued in Scotland. Unfortunately, actual flow of funds does not seem likely to occur until 2016 at the earliest.

Scottish National Marine Plan

Also important, the Scottish National Marine Plan (NMP) was approved in April after the long transition from the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010. The NMP has a section on the prospects for aquaculture and has a stated aspiration for the doubling of shellfish production by 2020 to around 13,000 tonnes.

However, there is one stated presumption which may cause some difficulties in that new developments are focused towards the use of Shellfish Waters Protected Areas (SWPAs) as defined in the 2013 legislation, which was intended to provide our sector with some water quality standards following the repeal of the Shellfish Growing Waters Directive (79/923 EC).

FSS workshop on traffic lights system

One of the less manageable aspects of our industry is the occurrence of natural algal blooms and predicting their occurrence. This year appears to have been atypical (again) in occurrence of the range and intensity of the outbreaks.

However, where we are gaining ever greater control is with the ability to identify and test to ensure End Product Standards are met when placing shellfish on the market. This control process comes at a cost to industry and considerable work is being undertaken 08/02/2013 both 11:24:01 by our official bodies and commercial companies selling monitoring equipment to ensure such costs are reasonable. Food Standards Scotland held a workshop in May to evaluate the benefits of the ‘traffic lights’ system, and will hold a follow-up event on the west coast later in the year. We have also devoted time at our conference to this issue.

Nick Lake is CEO of the ASSG and Janet Brown is editor of The Grower

Well done to all for keeping our sector in the headlines for reasons” the right