The third international seminar on Advanced Lessons in Economics from the Fisheries and Aquaculture (ALFAE) was held in Santiago de

Compestela, Galicia, Spain from 6-10 July 2015. The event, held every two years, attracted the participation of 36 speakers from 22 countries across five continents and was attended by more than fifty students, who staged debates about the state of the economy in these sectors and the latest in technological innovation, marketing and governance. FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation, awarded eight grants to students from China, Turkey, Brazil, India, Tanzania (2), Morocco and South Africa.

The seminar, which was aimed especially at participants with a university education or equivalent professional experience, research-ers, managers, industry players, consultants, advisers and other specialists involved in the socio-economics of fisheries and aquaculture, finally brought together over a hundred participants.

During this course, which took place at the headquarters of the Galician School of Public Administration, experts revealed that both the fisheries and the aquaculture are not without problems and challenges and agreed on the need that industry and government work together to overcome weaknesses and threats and take advantage of opportunities and strengths, including those related to the interactions between the two sectors.

ADVANCED LESSONS IN ECONOMICS by the International Aquafeed Staff Writer

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The course was directed by Professor Jose Manuel Fernandez Polanco and Professor Trond Bjorndal. It was apt to be held in Galicia which is the Spanish leader in many aspects of the seafood industry employing some 34,000 people.

Each day brought in new topics and speak-ers and covered a vast range of subjects with views from academia, industry and govern-ment.

The event was kicked off by Dr Jaqueline Alder, FAO, highlighting the latest information on the world’s 392 wild fisheries stocks and the domination of the China/Asian countries relating to aquaculture. An excellent debate was had regarding the needs for certification as consumers become more aware of sustain-able food offers.

Much was learned about the importance of the shellfish industry to Galicia and that will feature in a report in a later edition.

Professor Gunnar Knapp’s views on the ‘Interactions between Fisheries and Aquaculture’ highlighted the tensions in Alaska between ‘wild’ and ‘farmed’. He stressed that the diversity makes it very difficult to generalise about fisheries or aquaculture - or how they interact and focused his comments on Alaska. He stated, “40 percent of Alaska’s salmon are released from hatcheries - and start their lives just liked ‘farmed’ salmon yet

are harvested and promoted as “Wild Alaska Seafood”.

Knapp said “Fisheries have some com-petitive advantages over aquaculture in that nature produces wild fish ‘for free’ often in large volumes and that the fish are ‘natural’ products. However, across the entire value chain, fisheries have many inherent com-petitive disadvantages relative to aquaculture. These were higher costs of harvesting; season-ality of production; variation and unpredict-ability of production; variation in fish size and quality; remote locations; production con-straints; inability to increase production and the inability to improve or modify fish through selective breeding. It is these constraints that led to the replacement of most wild plant and animal gathering and hunting by agriculture.”

Inconsistent and unpredictable production clearly makes it much more difficult for wild salmon producers than for farmed salmon producers to meet buyers’ supply needs and to plan for marketing. Knapp specifically focused attention on Bristol Bay, the largest salmon run in Alaska and the world, and highlighted the economic issues in having to produce your entire year’s catch in a period of one month or less.

In concluding Professor Knapp said, “the important choices for society are not between aquaculture and wild fisheries. Significant

growth in fish production can only come from aquaculture. The important choices for society are between increasing aquaculture or increasing meat production. The challenge for society is to maximise the significant potential benefits from both wild fisheries and aquaculture.”

From University of Stavanger, Professor Frank Asche, presented on ‘Factors affect-ing efficiency in aquaculture business’ and commenced by emphasising that the world’s

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waterways and oceans are a great under utilised resource.

Professor Asche said, “Increasingly, land-based technologies are being adopted to use this resource and Aquaculture is the ‘food production’ arm of the ocean with Aquaculture being all about farming while fisheries are the world’s last large hunting industry. Aquaculture is an old technology, but a revolution took place in the 1970s as people began to use knowledge from agro-sciences to domesticate, breed and feed fish.”

Asche underlined that conditions favouring increased aquaculture production with popu-lation growth and economic growth leading to increased aggregate demand for food. With stagnating global catches of fish reducing the competitiveness of wild fish and globalisation reducing the cost of shipping products and increasing trade. Added to this, the growth of retail chains favouring supply chains with sufficient control to enable efficient logistics created the opening for aquaculture. To exploit these conditions, businesses must be competitive and competitive producers are efficient.

He added, “Aquaculture is the result of systematic Research and Development and innovation in water-based food production systems. Expansion of aquaculture produc-tion is profitable because of lower produc-tion cost due to a number of innovations and better technology increases productivity as one can produce more with the same input factors or increase the efficiency of those inputs.”

On productivity growth, specifically Salmon, Professor Asche said, “The develop-ment of input factors has been tremendous, with better feed, automatic feeding systems, etc and there is a substantial catching up potential for most species. Twenty years ago feed made up 25 percent of salmon farmers’ cost, and smolt about 20 percent whereas currently feed is 55 percent and smolt is down to 15 percent due to increased growth rates, earlier smolt release. On the other hand for efficient chicken farmers, feed is more than 80 percent of the production cost. Efficient

species are basically converters of cheap low quality inputs to more desirable outputs.”

Professor Asche concluded his talk high-lighting that “Aquaculture production will continue to increase because it has only just started to adopt technology from agriculture, and there is a tremendous scope for further productivity growth. As for all biological pro-duction processes, this creates environmental challenges, which can be solved. Clearly North America and EU lag behind Asia and aquacul-ture production is thus unevenly distributed around the word. Much of this has to do with what species are produced with what produc-tion technologies and inefficient producers will not survive.”

He added “that Europe and the USA is not succeeding in aquaculture is interesting because with one exception they have the best starting point. The exception is regula-tions that prevents efficient production.”

Asche’s one question was related to the fishmeal trap hypothesis (Wijkstrøm, Naylor et al) which suggests that growth in aquaculture production increases demand for forage fish to produce feed and this makes aquaculture inherently unsustainable and environmentally degrading, requires that forage fisheries are poorly managed, that forage fish have no substitutes, and that cost is not important for aquaculture production. This will eventually also put a limit on aquaculture production and requires that aquaculture feed must contain marine ingredients.

Two speakers from Professor Asche high-lighted the issues he raised regarding North America and Europe.

Professor Bertrand Le Gallic, University of Western Brittany presented on ‘Economic Sustainability of the EU Seafood Industry’ and was specifically centering on the need for improving competitiveness for the EU seafood sector.

Bertrand noted concerns for local, national and EU administrations and made mention of the H2020 SUCCESS program, which is a European research project financed for three years (2015-2018). It is part of the H2020 Strategy, which is the EU Research

and Innovation Program for the period 2014-2020. H2020 puts the emphasis on three core themes: science of excellence, industrial leadership and societal challenges. It aims to raise the level of excellence in Europe’s science base, encourage important achieve-ments, discoveries and “world-firsts” by taking great ideas from the lab to the market.

Included in the Blue Growth Strategy, defined by the European Commission as “a long term strategy to support sustainable growth in the marine and maritime sectors as a whole” (COM(2014) 254/2), SUCCESS specifically addresses topic BG-10-2014 : Consolidating the economic sustainability and competitiveness of European fisheries and aquaculture sectors to reap the potential of seafood markets.

Dr Carole Engle, Engle-Stone Aquatic LLC, spoke at some length regarding the issues confronting the aquaculture industry in USA, notably the Alabama Catfish industry based on years of personal involvement and study she had done.

Carole highlighted that many of the busi-nesses she had dealt with had little business education and that was the area where they were mainly failing. She said that the common reasons for failure were insufficient capital; poor credit or loan structure; poor inventory management or simply running out of cash. Carole said some of the legislation in the USA needed to be reviewed as clearly created an impediment to trade.

The event was sponsored by The Foundation Alfonso Martin Escudero in coop-eration with FAO and the Galicia Regional Ministry for Rural and Maritime Affairs and coordinated by CETMAR Foundation. The closing ceremony was conducted by Paloma Rueda Crespo, director-manager of Sea Technology Centre, coordinator of the semi-nar organisation, and was accompanied by Ignacio Llorente, a professor at the University of Cantabria. During her speech, the head of the Foundation CETMAR thanked the set of speakers and students work and praised the quality of the debates promoted throughout the week.

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