22 Responsible and Sustainable Aquaculture future volatility. Sustainability is resilience, and resilience should mean more manageable costs in the long-term. In the short term, we all have to find ways to manage when things get a little more expensive, and we’re working hard to make good on our supply and sustainability commitments and do so at the lowest cost possible. Traditionally, we have buffered rising costs by having a broad raw material basket for our feed ingredients. This means we are not dependent on any one supplier or raw material – as prices rise, we can switch. Recent events have seen raw material and energy prices rise globally, so this opportunity has changed. But this approach, together with developing sustainable production practices with our suppliers will help buffer against other events such as extreme weather impacts, more of which are predicted.
Pull effect to change mindset
AAP: European farmers and feed producers have taken sustainability as part of the business activity. Do you think that Asia Pacific’s farmers and feed producers pay less attention to environmental sustainability? Robb: If thinking about sustainability through the lens of its definition by existing sustainability standards, it is probably true that, on average, European industry and consumers both have more fully integrated sustainability into their practices and their demand for seafood. What is also true, though, is the diversity of production in Asia Pacific as compared to Europe, in terms of species, environments, farming methods, and undoubtedly in sustainability. There are many industry players across the region who are global leaders in sustainability – some are recognised as such, and many others are not. But farmers
and feed producers anywhere can only pay attention to environmental sustainability if they are incentivised to do so, which brings in the social and economic pillars of holistic sustainability. Since Asia provides most of the seafood the world eats, the global community has a responsibility to support and improve those aspects as much as we do the environmental performance. That said, however, there has been explosive development and widespread adoption of technologies focused on better farm management and greater sustainability in Europe that have not happened to the same degree in Asia Pacific. On-farm, you have water quality sensors and underwater cameras that allow farmers to constantly monitor their fish and the environment. Many farm have labs on site, or there are well-developed networks of labs, so disease testing and other health management technologies are more readily available than they often are in Asia. Furthermore, the amount of information these resources provide allows for intensive research and management of the challenges the European industry faces – not that these challenges have all been solved, and there are always new ones emerging, but in a world as complex as ours, information enables greater sustainability. Voorhees: At Cargill, we can work through our networks to transfer both the tech and the understanding of sustainability demands from places like Europe, ideally making the industry more sustainable, productive and profitable. But exporting the “good stuff” isn’t enough. We must also use our tools and capabilities to meet domestic seafood demand that is both more sustainable and fits local cultural and market expectations. Our ambition is to locally and globally couple sustainability with productivity and profitability.
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May/June 2022 AQUA Culture Asia Pacific
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