ALISON HEALY, Food and Farming Correspondent
Ireland’s status as an island nation is much-touted, yet we have failed to capitalise on it by building a thriving fish-farming industry.
Global demand for seafood is growing rapidly, far beyond what can be delivered from traditional wild-caught fish.
An estimated 42 million tonnes of extra seafood will be required annually by the year 2030 because of population growth. The global production of farmed salmon, which stands at two million tonnes a year, is expected to rise to three million tonnes by 2020.
So where does Ireland stand in the league of salmon farmers? The three main producers in Europe are Norway, Scotland and Ireland and all started developing salmon farms at around the same time. Norway is now producing one million tonnes of farmed salmon a year and plans to double that by 2020. Scotland produced 158,000 tonnes last year and salmon accounted for one-third of its food exports.
And Ireland? We are languishing at the bottom, having produced just 13,000 tonnes of salmon in 2011. However, much of this was organic, which secured a strong premium.
Irish Farmers Association (IFA) aquaculture executive Richie Flynn says we are not even close to taking full advantage of our opportunities for fish farming. “Not by a million miles. We produce as much farmed salmon in a year as they do in Norway in a very bad week.”
There are about 2,000 fish farm sites around the State, mainly growing salmon, trout, oysters and mussels. Flynn says they are run by an estimated 300 shellfish farmers and 40 fin-fish farmers. They range from tiny one-person operations in the west, to Marine Harvest – Ireland’s single biggest seafood company.
He says our coastline is one of the best placed in the world to grow fish, shellfish and seaweed. “But through a combination of lack of understanding, neglect and prejudice, the chance to secure the real potential employment for young people has been wasted for nearly two decades while the rest of the world has moved on.”
Flynn says fish farmers are struggling with the legacy of an incoherent bureaucracy and successive governments who have not bothered to educate themselves about the value of seafood production. This is compounded by “the inexplicable reluctance in the general public, media and business worlds to embrace our greatest asset, the sea”.
But the Government has big ambitions. The Food Harvest 2020 plan for the agri-food and fisheries sector contains a target to increase the volume of aquaculture production by 78 per cent by 2020, while increasing employment in the seafood sector from 11,000 to 14,000 people.
Last month, an eight-week public consultation period began into Bord Iascaigh Mhara’s (BIM) licence application for a deep-sea fish farm in Galway bay near the Aran islands. The project takes in 456 hectares spread over two sites and is 1.7km from the nearest land mass. This is much further out to sea than conventional fish farms and was planned this way to give more scope in terms of scale while lessening the visual impact.
The plan involves a potential 500 jobs and €100 million of exports. If the application is successful, the farm will produce another 15,000 tonnes of organic-certified salmon a year – more than doubling our current salmon production. If all goes according to plan, it could be up and running by November next year. The public consultation period ends on December 12th.
Other sites are being examined off the Mayo and Donegal coasts.
BIM’s chief executive Jason Whooley describes it as a very exciting and extremely novel project with massive market opportunities. “The single biggest issue facing Irish salmon producers today is that they cannot fulfil the demand for their product,” he says.
Some 350 of the expected jobs would be in production and processing and 150 would be in areas such as transportation and materials. This would provide a €14.5 million annual wages flow, mainly in the vicinity of the proposed farm. Rossaveal is the nearest landing point for the fish.
The licence, however, will not be given directly to a private company. Instead BIM will franchise it to a private operator so that the operator will have to meet requirements laid down by the State body, as well as adhering to EU and Irish standards.
Whooley says this will be the first time that a State entity has applied for a licence of this nature. The licence application must be approved by Minister for Agriculture, Food and Marine Simon Coveney, a fact that has been criticised by Friends of the Irish Environment. Its director Tony Lowes says it is unacceptable that the department that approves a licence is also the body overseeing the agency making the application.
Friends of the Irish Environment has several concerns about plans to develop these “super” fish farms. It cites issues such as the scale of the plans, the potential for pollution and the spreading of disease. Lowes says putting so many fish together is going to make it very difficult to control disease and parasites. He warns that open-net salmon farms can spread sea lice and says the waste generated by these farms can fuel the growth of algae, contributing to algae blooms and toxic outbreaks.
Whooley says he is very confident that the environmental impact statement prepared by BIM fully addresses these issues. He says BIM worked with some of the State’s most eminent marine scientists in the Marine Institute to identify the ideal locations for the Galway project. This site was chosen because the high waves and current will keep Galway Bay flushed and free of any fish excretion.
Concerns that sea lice larvae from salmon farms might attach themselves to wild salmon or sea trout are understandable, he says, but Ireland has strict precautionary controls that permit a minimum of sea lice on salmon farms. The only medicines approved here to treat the lice dissolve on contact with seawater. If the treatment doesn’t work, the farmer must empty the site of fish.
Flynn dismisses environmental concerns and says fish farming has replaced a tiny fraction of the ecosystem that was made unrecognisable due to over-exploitation of fish and shellfish. He welcomes the plans for the deep-sea farm but says BIM and Coveney have just as valuable a challenge in supporting the hundreds of family-run fish farms and businesses.
Fish farmers tell him they believe that the Government and bureaucracy would happily see the existing industry slip away into redundancy and obscurity “because we are perceived as being awkward or annoying in demanding the opportunity to see a return on our own investments”.
Flynn says Ireland doesn’t have a coherent marine strategy, just reports and strategies, “none of which addresses the core business criteria of raising capital and supporting industry with sound and workable legislation”. It’s left up to the industry to come up with new ideas to add value to products and create niche markets. “We are continuously let down by Irish retail and catering – with notable exceptions – who prefer to buy cheap imports and devalue our homegrown product with inaccurate labelling and fleecing the consumer.”
When asked if we could learn from other countries, he says they are coming to learn from us. “The French oyster industry in recent years has moved in to various coastal counties to snap up existing farms and unused areas because our growing cycle is so short due to the abundance of naturally occurring plankton, which also produces a far superior meat quality,” he says.
But the IFA believes other countries could show the Government how to run an efficient and robust licensing system. He points to 620 aquaculture licence applications awaiting approval, some for up to eight years. “In Scotland, which has well over 10 times Ireland’s salmon production and a supportive national government, it takes less than 11 months from start to finish to process and issue an aquaculture licence. The equivalent in Ireland is well over five years and counting,” he says. “Industry today can’t see a coherent strategy, just a long slow death by a thousand cuts.”
BIM disagrees, saying its deep sea project is part of a plan to build a sustainable future for our coastal communities.
“As a State body, we’ve had a very close relationship with coastal communities since 1952,” Whooley says. “It’s not in our interests to damage that.”
Fish farms Where are they and what are they farming
There are aquaculture operators in every coastal county. The salmon farming industry is located along the west and southwest coasts, with major centres of production in counties Donegal, Mayo, Galway and Cork
The oyster sector is spread all around the coast, but the greatest volumes of production come from counties Wexford, Waterford and Donegal. Similarly, the mussel industry is spread around all the coastal counties, with major production centres in Louth, Wexford, Cork and Kerry
Salmon
Production: 13,000 tonnes
Sales value: €90 million
Oysters
Production: 7,000 tonnes
Value : €30 million
Mussels
Production : 23,000 tonnes
Value : €17 million
Other species (inc luding scallops, urchins, abalone, freshwater trout and perch)
Value: €1.8 million