Opinion

MANY years ago, I was asked on to a panel in Selfridges in London to discuss aquaculture and the ways forward. It was a time, as now, when the industry was being attacked by the usual dogmatic and ill-informed people.The difference with this panel was that it would be hosted by a TV presenter, who would both field and ask questions.

Unsurprisingly, the subject came round to fishmeal and its sustainability. I replied, as always, that fishmeal production had been stable for a very long time.

She asked about the future and again I replied about alternative options and their issues. Most importantly, I said we did not need the alternatives simply to replace fishmeal but to allow the industry to grow and produce more and more, healthy nutritious food.

So this is where the discussion started to get audience interest, particularly when I mentioned that we should be wary of feeding animals a diet which did not correspond to their natural one at least at some level.

BSE was still very much in the public consciousness then, and the question developed into what things were appropriate.

Of course, the easy answer is vegetable protein and fat as these are readily available and cheap. But the use of these leads to the obvious argument of why not feed them direct to humans and avoid the natural wastage of feeding it to another species.Also, one can hardly argue that vegetables are a natural food source for fish.

Our company, Loch Duart, was high in its fishmeal use (I still have no issue with this) but, when pressed, I mentioned possible alternatives such as fly and worm production using waste.

And then I moved on to meals produced by other industries, such as chicken bone and feather meals.

The universal view of the group present and the panel chair was that this was disgusting and they did not want to know about it. It was a very useful lesson for me.

The public want sustainability and they want to stop waste but the decisions required to implement these changes are not easy to address in the public eye.

What’s more, the media love stories about feed ingredients for any form of farming, especially if they can make them sound disgusting.

For our industry, so predicated on finding new ways, this could prove a very challenging issue.

I laud all of the people who are working to find alternatives that don’t include sources that can be fed direct to humans.

The work to try to find ways of producing food from the parts of animals that we don’t eat is incredibly important in an overpopulated world.

Sadly, however laudable all of this is, it will be utterly useless if the outlets for this feed cannot use it for risk of being exposed, even when it is the right thing to do.

I don’t need to remind the reader that our industry is almost never fairly represented and that too many people make a living out of finding shock stories about our production.

The industry has not been the best at dealing with potential negative press.We tend to be against proactively acting in our own best interests by facing these challenges before government acts or we get attacked in the media.

So, for a change, why don’t we take the initiative on this issue? There is

not one company in our industry that would not use these products if they were safe, effective and good value.

But there is not one company that isn’t afraid of the potential damage in the marketplace from some irrational piece of bad journalism.

I believe it is time to get a group together and start a proper dialogue in the public eye about these products before they are in general use.

We need to find a group of people who are not actively involved in aquaculture to lionise their use and to be willing to go public with their weight behind these products.

The companies that produce these alternatives have taken a huge commercial risk and the benefits accrued from their endeavour will help the world move forward.

Some will say they should do their own PR but, let’s face it, it took the salmon industry 50 years before it began to get its act together.

Maybe we should put a shoulder to the wheel to ensure that our markets and others don’t founder because we knew what would hap

pen and did nothing.

“The media love stories about feed ingredients if they can make them sound disgusting ”