(IntraFish) This can happen without a substantial increase in raw material prices, Ewos CEO argues. The aquaculture industry can double its output without causing a “substantial” hike in raw materials, a feed executive argued.
Speaking at the European Maritime Day in Sweden on May 22, Ewos’ CEO Kjell Bjordal argued that farmed seafood supply must reach 120 million metric tons by 2030 if the industry wants to meet the needs of a growing population. The world’s population is set to reach 8.2 people in 2030, up 17 percent from 7 billion today.
Fish is not only the best poised protein to meet this growing demand, the industry is also able to take on this growth by using substitutes for marine feed and by continuing to innovate, Bjordal said.
According to him farmed fish’s efficiency -- its low feed conversion ratio and carbon footprint -- combined with its healthy attributes mean it will be the winner on the global market. “We believe that the market allocates the raw materials to the most efficient production -- and fish, is the winner,” his presentation read. Carnivorous fish are only a drop in the ocean of farmed fish.
Only 3 percent of global farmed fish are carnivorous, and their production is expected to increase at an annual rate of 3.5 percent, reaching 5.2 million metric tons in 2030, up from 2.6 million metric tons in 2010. In contrast non-carnivorous fish production is expected to grow by 4.8 percent to 149 million fish in 2030, up from 57 metric tons in 2010.
“We can expect [the] percentage of non-carnivore fish ‘on feed’ to increase from 50 percent in 2010 to 80 percent in 2030, Bjordal’s presentation says.
Marine proteins are often cited as the main limitation to expanding aquaculture. While marine proteins can “to a large extent be replaced by vegetable proteins, the “only obvious limitation” consists of marine oils, namely the EPA and DHA fatty acids, Bjordal said.
However, here again there is hope. “We now have the technical capability to grow salmon on zero marine raw material,” even though the solution is not commercial viable at this stage, he said.
His comment referred to the industry’s progress in using oil from omega-3 rich algae to replace marine raw material. However, this technique is still relatively expensive compared to using fish oil.
In the future, the industry will look at solutions such as genetically modified vegetable oils, omega-3 producing micro-organisms and “harvesting oceans down the chain” to increase supply of the valuable fatty acids, Bjordal said.
This refers to the possibility of using algae as a potential future substitute for fish oil. Ewos is notably behind a project called CO2Bio which aims to take purified CO2 from the industrial site of Mongstad in Norway to cultivate algae.