Hopes for seafood ‘Silicon Valley’
FIVE Nordic countries which have launched a new initiative to achieve sustainable development in fishing, aquaculture and agriculture were told the region could become the new Silicon Valley for food.
Plankton, seaweed and edible insects were on the menu when the prime ministers of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway met near Bergen recently.
They launched a project called Nordic Solutions to Global Challenges, which aims to achieve the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030.
The Nordic leaders said they want to focus on sustainable food production in order to fight climate change.
The prime ministers ate their climate friendly lunch in a tent outside the Austevoll Research Station, one of Europe’s largest and most advanced research facilities for studies of fish welfare and the ecological effects of aquaculture.
Gunhild Stordalen, founder of the EAT foundation, an initiative to reform the global food system, told the premiers: ‘I believe the Nordics can become the Silicon Valley of future food.
‘What we need is a coherent food and agricultural policy, linking what we produce to what we should eat,’ she said, adding that ‘unhealthy diets are now posing a greater threat to public health than tobacco’.
‘The majority of us are still eating too much meat, sugar and salt, and too little fish, vegetables and whole grains.’
The PMs were served various shellfish, farmed halibut and fried mealworms – all arranged with flowers and edible pine tree needles.
They were also presented with Sophia, a 20-year-old halibut, swimming in one of the giant water tanks in the research centre. In the wild, halibut rarely live long enough to grow to their full potential
weight of 200-300 kilos (for female fish).
‘We can manipulate the fish to reproduce as females only, with the advantage that the female halibut fish grow much bigger than the males,’ explained one of the researchers at Austevoll Research Station.