sustainable

Lea Wermelin, Denmark’s 35-year-old minister of the environment, has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum joining a who’s who of political,…

Producing food requires huge resources but an estimated one seventh of the resulting products are lost before they are consumed, and in the case of fish and seafood as much as one third! Whether spoiled, destroyed or carelessly thrown away – losses on the way from origin to plate are high. New strategies are now being developed to reduce or, better still, to avoid food waste and losses altogether. This article was featured in EUROFISH Magazine 5 /2020. During the catching and processing of fish and seafood considerable amounts of waste occur. Some of it, roughly estimated at around 17%, is “disposed of” at sea immediately after the catch. About twice as much is lost during processing on land. And then there are also losses that occur during transport, at individual stages of trade, in the catering trade, or in consumers’ homes. A definition of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is often used to distinguish between “food losses” and “food waste”.

The North Western Waters Advisory Council (NWWAC) is one of the EU’s 11 fisheries advisory councils.…

The European Parliament held a stakeholder meeting on the current challenges facing the aquaculture sector, with emphasis on production. The speakers included fish farmers representing marine aquaculture in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to pond farming in the Czech Republic, with additional experts from Hungary, Belgium, and Croatia. Dr. Halasi-Kovács of the NAIK Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary underlined in his presentation, the potential of freshwater aquaculture. Presenting some general trends in the EU, he said, 85% of aquaculture production originates from marine sources while only 12 percent is from freshwater production. Production from pond aquaculture has not grown in the last decade within the EU, although globally freshwater aquaculture production constitutes 60 percent of total farmed fish production, while marine production contributes less than 30 percent.