Hamish Macdonell
Context is key to the information provided by food producers
IT is the year 2030 and, after parking your electric vehicle on the charging pad outside your local supermarket, you wander inside to do your weekly shop, armed with a trolley load of biodegradable hessian bags. Stopping at the fish counter, you pick up a (paper, not plastic) packet of two salmon fillets and zip your smart watch over the packaging. Up pops a virtual image of the farm the fish came from plus a host of other information. There are tables showing the treatments used, the dates the fish were treated and the amounts of medicine used.
There are other charts, going back years, showing sea lice levels, survivability stats and escapes, all on a weekly basis.
Antibiotic use – when these fish were just smolts- is also scrolling before your eyes along with Sepa (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) compliance scores for this and every farm in the area, going back years.
Even for those working in the farmed salmon sector, this would be bewildering and confusing, let alone for ordinary consumers, but this is the future some pressure groups and charities want us to deliver.
Their mantra appears to be: make everything available to everyone. They believe the consumer should have every piece of information from every farm and this information should be readily available and linked to every piece of salmon sold.
Those who doubt this is the case should have been at a recent conference organised by Fidra, the environmental charity, in London recently.
Fidra are one of the bodies pushing for more and more information to be made available and they are supported by other lobbying and pressure groups too.
This puts the farmed salmon sector in a difficult position, not because we object to the publication of information – we don’t – but because information, in itself, is not the answer.
We want to be as open and transparent as possible. We have already committed to moving towards the swifter and more frequent publication of lice and survivability data and we also voluntarily publish wrasse data.
But the key to all this is context.
There is no point in linking a piece of fish bought in a supermarket to a particular farm – and all the data that flows from that – unless it actually means something to the consumer.
Bald figures showing a cohort of salmon received one treatment of emamectin benzoate 12 months before harvest doesn’t say anything about the overall health and welfare of the fish or the farm or the company running that farm.
There is then the issue of whether consumers actually want this information.
It is undoubtedly true that retailers are coming under pressure to provide more and more information and they are responding to this by publishing layers of graphs and statistics on their websites showing the sustainability of the food in their stores.
But how many consumers actually want to see it? About nineteen million portions of salmon are sold every month in the UK yet, on average, only about 65 people from the UK search for the survivability data the SSPO publishes each month and just 66 people search for sea lice data.
And, guess what? These are almost always the same people. Some are from within the sector, more come from pressure groups and lobbying organisations, and even more from the small number of anti-farm organisations looking for information to use in their anti-salmon crusades.
The simple reality is that consumers want to trust the retailers. They want to know the retailer has done the work and analysed the data so they, as consumers, don’t have to.
So, as long as the retailers have the information they need from us, as a sector, then everything should be okay, right?
Well, not quite. We have to be aware that there will be pressure on us to match up with the best standards set for other food producers.
If a consumer can pick up a beef steak and find out immediately which farm that meat came from, what the cattle there were fed and how they were looked after, then some of them – just some of them- will expect something similar from us too.
This means we are in a sustainability information race, forced on all producers by a section of the most demanding consumers, and we have to be in it or risk falling behind.
And that brings us back to context.
We want to publish information about sea lice,
“The consumer wants to know the supermarket has analysed the data so they don’t have to”
about survival rates, about escapes, about treatments and about cleaner fish.
But these figures are only worth publishing and linking to each farm if they come with explanations as to why treatments were used, how they prevented problems from arising in the first place and how a whole suite of measures is used, across a long timeframe.
Also, most importantly, all medicine use should be accompanied by a clear statement (echoing that made by Scotland’s chief vet last year) that not a trace of the medicine remains in the salmon delivered to the consumer.
This is the context the consumer needs, otherwise the information will be misleading, confusing or frightening – and possibly all three.
So, it is almost certain that, back in that aisle next to the fish counter in 2030, there will be a host of new information available and clearly visible, whether consumers want it or not.
But instead of meaningless tables and charts of figures, it would be far better to have a picture of the farm, key details about the fish produced there and the stamp of approval of the retailer who would guarantee the provenance and the quality of product.
We do not want to keep information secret. We want to provide the information showing how sustainable we are, but we have to be able to provide the context.
Otherwise, everyone will lose and that will include the very consumers we are all supposed to be serving.