Seaweed industry boosted ...with a little financial kelp
IT was the trade whose boom and bust brought money then misery to thousands of crofters in the Highlands and islands.
But now the west coast’s seaweed industry – whose collapse in the 1820s prompted a wave of clearances – is being backed by the Scottish Government for a revival to help bolster fragile communities.
The Scottish government’s Marine Fund Scotland has announced a £270,000 grant for a seaweed processing plant at Kyle of Lochalsh, intended to help seaweed farmers.
Farmers and industry experts say it will now help the budding trade to take off.
Seaweed can be used as a fresh food, as a dried ingredient and for food additives. Compounds from it can be used to boost plant growth and in the pharmaceutical industry, and for biodegradable packaging.
A report has said the Scottish seaweed trade, currently turning over £4 million a year, could grow to almost 20 times that size, cutting unemployment in some areas by more than a third.
The global seaweed industry is worth around £7 billion a year.
Norway produces about 10 times as much seaweed as Scotland, with France a major player and Ireland producing double Scotland’s output.
Eco Cascade will use its grant to set up facilities to process hundreds of tonnes of seaweed each year, chopping it and drying it.
A further £99,000 has been granted to a research team at Scotland’s Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBIOC), in the central belt, to develop new uses for the product.
The two grants are among 60 handouts to the seafood industries, the rest of which will be announced today.
Rural Economy cabinet secretary Mairi Gougeon said: “Although the existing Scottish seaweed industry is small, there is exciting potential to develop the commercial seaweed-based industry.”
Alison Baker of Eco Cascade said the lack of processing facilities was a bottleneck which had held the industry back.
She said: “This opens up a great opportunity for us. It’s an investment in the seaweed industry and it allows the business to grow with the confidence that producers can get their harvest stabilised, processed and available to a broad range of customers.”
Eco Cascade will also research fermenting, freezing and other ways of handling seaweed.
The Scottish Government report suggested that the seaweed industry could have a total turnover of £71.2m per year by 2040, but only if it was given a chance to grow.
The greatest impact would be on island communities which could see a fall in unemployment of 36 per cent.
At the moment, most of Scotland’s seaweed is collected from the wild.
There are only around five farms in operation but licence applications have been made for a dozen or so more as would-be farmers eye up a potential gold rush.
Seaweed farmers say their product, while pricier than the wild product, is more environmentally friendly, consistent, and cleaner.
Seaweed farmer and expert Dr Kyla Orr produced a report earlier this year saying a lack of onshore processing and handling facilities was holding back the Scottish seaweed industry.
Dr Orr, who has a PHD in seaweed science, said: “It’s great the Scottish Government has been able to do this, and we would like to see them doing more.”
If the Eco Cascade plant is successful, she said grants could establish similar hubs up and down the coast to give producers easier access.
Dr Orr believes a revived industry could help keep people rooted in fragile communities on the west coast, where populations were devastated by the collapse of the seaweed industry in the 1820s. For decades crofters had dried and burned seaweed in vast quantities to create chemicals needed in the budding soap and glass industries.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars and reopening of trade with Europe meant cheap imports could undercut the Scottish producers, and the business collapsed.
Landowners who had grown rich on the labour of the seaweed-burning crofters no longer needed so many people on their estates. Many were turned off the land and forced to migrate abroad.
This opens up a great opportunity for us