Our guest this month is Alistair Lane, the Executive Director of the European Aquaculture Society. He’s talking to us today about EAS Events, about Covid-19 and the state of the industry in Europe in general and hopefully a little bit wider than that. So welcome Alistair and thank you for joining us!
Well top of my list of questions is, what has Covid-19 meant for your membership, how has it impacted the organisation and how has the organisation responded?
As you can imagine, it has been the biggest thing that has hit aquaculture for years. We talk about escapes, we talk about disease but actually closing the market or having the market closed by forcing people to stay indoors in many European countries has flattened out demand completely - not just in the direct purchase sector but in the hotel, restaurant and catering sector; which more or less came to a standstill.
So it’s been difficult for aquaculture producers. The European Union Market Observatory for Aquaculture (EUMOFA) from February to July published weekly newsletters to inform people about the status, especially for these two sectors.
What we saw basically was demand more or less flattening out. A lot of producers had to continue harvesting but they had to freeze a lot of product. The farms that suffered more were the shellfish producers who can’t freeze, they had stock in the water potentially with disease implications as we went through the spring – with spawning as well as the water getting warmer.
For the smaller fish producer, not having the capability to freeze meant having to rely on producer organisations or they were unable to provide to markets. So the financial losses were significant and serious.
In terms of our membership that is mainly in the research sector, there were issues because experiments with live animals had to keep going, people had to keep feeding fish and other species that were under experimentation. That meant a slow down in terms of the amount of science being generated. The priority was keeping the experiments going while effectively working from home as much as they could.
Do you think there was an uplift in uptake of fish through supermarkets and domestic demand, or was this insignificant in the whole scheme of things?
In Europe, and in Asia, producers and their organisations were having to develop new lines to market. Some of these were the frozen market, which has increased quite considerably. But also online sales, delivery to homes or even local food trucks with fresh fish coming from the ports.
Every early on the European Commission put together, let’s call it, a ‘rescue package’ or a ‘financial aid package’ for fisheries and aquaculture which was part of the European Union Maritime Fisheries Fund, whereby money was fast-tracked and available for the fishing fleets that were kept in port but also for aquaculture producers for loss in revenue against operating costs.
What do you think is the long term impact or consequences, positive ending for the industry?
First of all that frozen seafood, there is a market there. Having been forced to a certain level it has shown that with freezing techniques that we have now, frozen product can be just as good as fresh product.
The difference is the live market that is small in Europe but is fairly significant in Asia. But these have shown new possibilities as well in shortening the supply chain - as we are seeing with a lot of other products, especially vegetables, fruits, etcetera. I think that the resilience of food chains is the big question here and I think seafood has shown itself very resilient to this type of challenge.
Do you think as a consequence that we might see production returning to normal levels quickly or maybe even surpassing as demand increasing?
Demand is definitely coming back as consumers understand the benefits of seafood products, their health benefits and as we now know that we need to keep ourselves in good shape to try to ward off infections from Covid-19.
Seafood is a logical candidate for that. So demand could well rise, the problem that we have in aquaculture is long growth cycles. So the time from production, the supply of juvenile fish, to market size is of course longer so there is a lag in the system.
But we could see a potential small rise in Europe. The Commission is certainly focussing as we go through the next programme era, to maximise and increase European fish production, which is something that we’ve been looking towards for many years. Through newer production technologies, cleaner production technologies we are certainly looking to have increases in total production within Europe.
Among your membership is there some economic suffering occurring or overall are things looking better than anticipated?
In terms of our actual membership and activities, we’ve in some ways taken advantage of people working from home. We’ve increased quite considerably our series of webinars and podcasts. We have 15 webinars now that are available to EAS members, in the members section of our website. We’ve had more than 1500 people join in those webinars.
We have six podcasts, we’re only just really starting that series but it’s been a way of implementing part of the strategy that we put together for the EAS community a few years ago now to fast track that with services that we can supply to members online for them to network outside of normal conferences and events.
And talking about conferences and events Alistair, you’ve had to postpone as have all other event organisers this year. Can you bring us up to date about what’s happening in Ireland or Madeira for instance and the European Aquaculture Society later on in 2022?
We had to take the hard decision to postpone the event that was planned at the end of September in Cork, in Ireland. That’s now going ahead, but as an online event, so not in Cork.
We decided to maintain 2021 AE2021 event in Funchal, Madeira and that will take place as a physical meeting from October 4 to 7, 2021.. And the board of the EAS confirmed back in February, the last time it met physically, and approved the location of Rimini, Italy for Aquaculture Europe 2022.
So we are going ahead with the planning of those events.
But we are very confident that Madeira can go ahead because by the end of quarter two next year we may well have a vaccine available and the travel policy of research institutes and companies might mean they can travel if they’ve been vaccinated or had a recent test suggesting that they can indeed travel to our events.
We still believe that face-to-face events are interesting to those that attend and we certainly plan to maintain that planning as we look forward to next year and the year after.
Well that’s good news as we are all missing the events and the opportunity to meet up and have those face-to-face discussions. What your society and others do is a very important part of keeping the industry together across borders and on implortant issues. I just picked up on Rimini, Italy what were the dates for that?
AE2022 will take place in Rimini from September 27 to 30 and we've already held our first planning meeting. It is an excellent location.
Alistair Lane thank you very much for joining us this afternoon, our time. All the best for your plans with all your plans for AE2020 as an online event. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us today. Thank you very much.
