Peruvian fishery failure puts squeeze on fish food factories
The grim news was presented to some 120 delegates of a workshop on aquaculture innovation held on Vancouver Island this week by Jason Mann, Purchasing Manager for the fish feed producer EWOS Canada. In a presentation entitled “Developments in Sustainable Ingredients for Aquaculture Feed”, Mr. Mann also told the audience about a widespread drought earlier this year that has caused the price of grains and other agricultural products used to make fish feed to go up. Other considerations that may have an impact on the future production of fish and fish feed in North America are;
- An increasing global shortage of protein
- The price of food in general is trending upwards
- The World population is growing, and suffering from more ailments
- Employment in rural towns is declining
- There are increased demands from biofuel; some ~40% of US corn production is now being used to produce ethanol, resulting in a doubling of the price of corn
- The Canadian Feeds Act is 30 years old and out-dated; it is easier from a regulatory standpoint to bring food into the country than to get approvals for growing it here
- People want home-grown food
- There is an increasing usage of fish oil into food supplement capsules, which do not have the same beneficial effects to people’s health as consuming the fish itself
- Fish are efficient converters of forage fish to edible protein, with a feed conversion rate of close to 1.2 to 1. Poultry is usually at a 2 to 1 rate, pigs 3 to 1 and beef cattle 6 to 1
- There is only about a million tonnes of fish oil produced each year, but over 100 million tonnes of vegetable oils
- Fish meal production is around 6-7 million tonnes per year.
Mr. Mann pointed out that his company alone produces some 1.1 million tonnes of fish food each year (2011), while the entire world production of food for farmed salmon is about 3.9 million tonnes.
