Alistair Lane on 20 years at the EAS
EAS chief on 20 years at the heart of European aquaculture - and staging its number one show
THE European Aquaculture Society (EAS) is a special club. Like any club, it has members, a board, probably a few rules, and it operates on many levels all year round. But it is best known in the industry for a single week of frenetic activity, the Aquaculture Europe shows that it stages annually in shifting European venues.
Regular visitors from Europe, and increasingly from beyond, will be familiar with the format: hundreds of parallel scientific sessions, sometimes spread across different floors of a huge conference centre (Berlin) or different hotels in a Mediterranean resort (Dubrovnik).
This club may not have a dress code but running shoes are advised in show week.
Networking is not compulsory but with daily happy hours, a President’s Reception and student socials, mixing with fellow show goers is unavoidable.
In a crowded calendar of aquaculture events, the EAS conference and trade exhibition is undoubtedly a highlight, retaining its research based focus while introducing new elements every year.
Overseeing all this for the past 20 years has been Alistair Lane, EAS executive director since March 2000.
He spoke to Fish Farmer last month just as he and the EAS board were about to meet to discuss potential locations for Aquaculture Europe 2022.
‘We send out a call every year to all of our members and ask them if they want to host Aquaculture Europe in their countries,’ he said. ‘It’s two to three bids per call, with the decision made by the EAS board.
‘The downside is, as it gets bigger, the membership may be put off making a bid because they think they can’t afford to do all the work.’
The EAS team works two years in advance and plans will already be well advanced for the 2021 show, to be held in Madeira.
But all the attention now is on Cork, in Ireland, which is due to host this year’s event, from September 29 to October 2.
Lane said much of the hard work – ‘the building blocks’- is undertaken by the EAS’s professional partners, John Cooksey of the World Aquaculture Society, Mario Stael of MarEvent and the EAS staff.
And, as with every EAS event, a local organising committee is also involved.
Their job is to promote it locally and obtain funding and support, to organise the technical tours and the industry forum, and to help recruit students to help out.
Lane’s own role, he said, is ‘building the events that hopefully give people something new each year’.
In Cork this will be an inaugural workshop day, RAS at EAS, on September 29, which will then be continued at future shows.
‘RAS events are starting to grow across the world and RAS covers so many disciplines within aquaculture research,’ said Lane.
‘What we’re trying to do with the RAS at EAS is avoid presentations – we’re making it specifically focused on experience sharing, so we’re taking two or three key questions under the general envelope of RAS and each session will be a moderated panel discussion, with panellists from science and also from industry.
‘There will be one introductory short presentation at the beginning of each session and then it’s all about the panel and audience discussion.’
He said apart from the RAS workshop, Cork would feature two other one-day events within the platform of Aquaculture Europe.
Innovation forum
As well as the RAS day, there will be the Innovation Forum (launched last year in Berlin), and the industry forum, what used to be called the farmers day, which is more specific to aquaculture in the location of the conference.
Lane said it was ‘tempting’ to organise one-off EAS events outside the conventional Aquacul
ture Europe shows.
‘We considered doing what we call ‘deep dive’ events. You take one discipline or one subject, such as closed containment or RAS, and it’s tempting to make a separate event of that in between the different Aquaculture Europe events.
‘The problem with that is it creates one more event and there are so many. Today, you could go to one aquaculture event in Europe probably almost every week.
‘There are so, so many and people have to choose. So we thought Aquaculture Europe is a platform, let’s keep it there and not do the deep dive events separately.’
This worked in Berlin, first with the Nordic RAS conference that was timed to coincide with the EAS conference, and helped bring record attendance to Aquaculture Europe 2019.
The inaugural Innovation Forum was also judged a success and Lane hopes the same interest will be generated in Cork.
‘There are a lot of fairly recent initiatives on innovation, trying to match make pitchers and investors, happening all around the world. And we thought we should be doing this because we have so much knowledge, presented in the event and in the [EAS] journal.
‘But the real idea and principal objective of the EAS is to bridge this gap between science and stakeholders, science and industry, science and policy, science and consumers, and the Innovation Forum is a logical way to build on this huge resource of knowledge that we have.’
He has said in the past that Europe used to be strong on research but maybe not on innovation, but this is changing.
‘There is still possibly a lag in the way in which science is measured through only high impact peer review. But of course science also needs to be measured in terms of its translation into the development of its associated industries.’
In Cork, the EAS will be teaming up again with Hatch Blue, the aquaculture accelerator company.
‘It’s always best to partner up with organisations that do this as their day job, because we don’t have the skill set to organise these things completely on our own,’ said Lane.
There were a few fund managers in the room at the Berlin Innovation Forum, who ‘knew very well who they wanted to talk to afterwards’ but it is a challenge to attract investors to what is essentially a scientific conference.
‘It was thanks to the German Startups Association and, to a certain extent, Hatch but a lot of work was done by the conference chair, Stefan Meyer, in building up this forum.’
Innovation forums and an audience of investors are far removed from the early days of the EAS, which was established in 1976.
‘The EAS was born out of a marine biology symposium held in Ostend in 1975 and the EAS was founded in 1976,’ said Lane.
‘It came out of the idea that there needed to be some kind of European focal point for aquaculture development at that time, which was basically happening in Norway and in nascent activity in the Mediterranean.
‘The EAS is not all about salmon – there are 70 plus species in culture in Europe, and five species (salmon, shellfish, sea bream and bass, trout, carp)
The principal objective of the EAS is to bridge this gap between science and industry”
account for 75-80 per cent of the production.
‘But it was dominated by Norway in the beginning because we had an excellent long term agreement with the Nor Fishing Foundation to organise a conference alongside Aqua Nor [held then in the NTNU university in Trondheim].’
Salmon focused
It was initially very salmon focused but Lane said since 2000, when the EAS formalised an agreement with the World Aquaculture Society to organise a joint event every six years, international attendance has grown, with more people from Asia and South America interested in what’s happening in Europe.
Then, when they started to develop the trade shows from 2007 (in Istanbul), the EAS decided it made sense to collaborate with the WAS.
‘The exhibition customer base is more or less the same and they have a lot of experience in organising the WAS and the other shows,’ said Lane.
The unique selling point of the EAS is ‘a helicopter view of everything that’s happening in European aquaculture’, but Norwegian participation remains ‘very, very high’.
‘The Norwegian research sector is thriving and strong,’ said Lane. ‘At our conferences if there is one country that’s dominating in terms of attendance then it’s Norway.
‘EAS membership is very linked to the research resources and effort. If you look, for example, at the highest participation in EU projects it’s basically Norway, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and one or two other countries – and that is reflected in our membership and attendees at the scientific events.’
He has also seen more Eastern and Central European involvement in the EAS, a trend that began in the mid-2000s, when Laszlo Varadi from Hungary was the EAS president.
‘We realised there was so much happening in Central and Eastern Europe, notably the Czech Republic and Hungary. And we moved towards Poland to see what was happening there in the development of species away from traditional carp culture, with the start of pike perch culture and other species. And then it spread further north and east towards Ukraine and Russia.’
In fact, Russia was on the list of possibilities for Aquaculture Europe 2012 when the EAS board looked at Moscow and St Petersburg.
‘We realised it was going to be a little bit complicated at that time so we decided to go for a lower risk location, which turned out to be Prague.’
There is an international perspective at EAS shows but Lane said the big difference between the WAS and EAS events is that the latter gets many fewer Americans.
‘This is partly due to budget and travel restrictions. So American researchers, scientists and aquaculture stakeholders are favouring shows like Aquaculture America which was recently held in Hawaii, for example, where the travel is easier.
‘Before, you had a budget to attend eight to 10 conferences a year and now maybe that’s down to two or three so you have to make choices.’
Early stages
Lane’s own background is firmly rooted in Europe, although he hails from north-west London. After studying for an MSc in Marine Biology (‘there were no aquaculture degrees then’) in Bangor, he headed to Paris.
‘The first couple of jobs were based in the early stages, the development of larval feed and so on -that was one of the huge bottlenecks of aquaculture at the time.
‘And then I kind of weaned myself on to the actual feed market, working with Ewos in Spain as marketing manager and then as general manager in France.’
He worked in feeds for 14 years, at Frippak, Sanofi-France Aquaculture, as well as Ewos, always in Europe, by desire rather than accident.
‘I think I could have found chances to work outside of Europe but aquaculture in Europe in the mid-80s was extremely exciting, both in research and in the development of aquaculture outside of Norway and into the Mediterranean especially.
‘And I decided that’s where I wanted to focus and I didn’t need to go and live and work in Asia or the Americas, there was so much potential in Europe.’
His first involvement in the EAS was presenting his MSc at Aquaculture Europe in 1987 and attending many other Aquaculture Europe events, before joining the staff in March 2000.
Over the past two decades, the ‘biggest change
by far’ in the EAS has been the expansion of the original university type scientific meetings for 300 to 400 to full city congress centres with more than 1,500 participants and exhibitors, said Lane.
There have been changes in the European aquaculture industry too, mainly in terms of control of the production cycle.
This has been achieved, said Lane, through massively increased knowledge of biological needs and technology to improve monitoring and automate certain labour intensive operations. But despite such progress, there is still a lack of growth
He argues that because farmers have lowered their environmental footprint, particularly their nitrogen and phosphorous impacts, they should be allowed to grow at existing sites, with significant changes to the way in which Environmental Impact Assessments are developed and monitored.
‘With genomic selection, the way in which we do our husbandry, with co-culture of other species, we can reduce our environmental impact and we can demonstrate that.
‘If we can show a trend of reduced impact then we should be allowed to increase our production on that site. That’s not happening now but I’d like to see that happening.’
European aquaculture producers could strengthen their sector with the continued empowerment of producer organisations, the predictability of performance, and the sharing of data.
‘Data has always been one of our poor points. We have it in house but still so much is done manually or on an Edexcel spreadsheet, but there will probably in the next five to 10 years be a revolution in data accumulation, controlling our production and having that data used for the industry as a whole or the species sector as a whole and not just for individual operators.’
Build bridges
But against this background of change, the EAS’s mission, to build bridges between science and the industry, has remained the same.
The core team has also remained in place, with Lane, Cooksey and Stael – ‘all still friends’- at the centre of events for a generation.
What about the future for the indsutry in Europe? Lane doesn’t think it is necessarily easier to be a new entrant today than it used to be.
‘There were different risks 20 years ago, it was a boom development period. We had a lot of things we didn’t know. Now it’s more of a case that the training, the education and qualifications to work in aquaculture are becoming more complex and technology driven.
‘The scientific knowledge is necessary but also the knowledge of equipment, of technology and how to use that best. That’s probably the biggest thing that’s changed.
‘Probably one of the biggest things in my last 20 years (or my first 20 years!) in the EAS has been that – we were doing things more or less blindly at the time.
‘It was a hugely exciting period to start to grow aquaculture in Europe away from just salmon aquaculture, which started in the 70s of course.’
He said aquaculture will become more professional, ‘in the way in which we control and manage, and make sure that the unknowns become knowns’.
‘We still have a certain mortality in our production cycles, in sea bass and sea bream and also in salmon which we find difficult to explain; we can’t logically account for it or find a good reason for having some losses.
‘These losses may be 10 per cent, 15 per cent or maybe more of our production and we still don’t know why we’re losing those fish.’
As for the next pioneers, he said younger people are understanding that the careers in aquaculture are actually quite varied.
‘With the EAS there is an ageing demographic of our membership, which is changing quite dramatically over the years. The young people now in European aquaculture are definitely the generation which are going to make another step change in the development of European aquaculture.
‘This is both because of the technology revolution that’s happened since the 80s and also, more recently, I think that the younger European scientists are much more polyvalent than the older generation of scientists, that were still driven by this idea of the number of peer reviewed scientific posts as the success factor for their career.
‘Unfortunately, that university system is still there but if scientists 20 years ago were [perceived to be] in ivory towers; that has changed enormously.
‘And that’s good for the industry. Knowledge is science based of course. But if that knowledge doesn’t get to the sector then we’re not doing our job.
‘The EAS was developed in 1976 with that objective, and it’s still as valid today as it was 30 or 40 years ago.’
If knowledge doesn’t get to the sector then we’re not doing job” our