Professor Simon Davies
Creoso - welcome
Greetings and a Happy New Year! Welcome to our No one edition of 2016 and wishing all our readers a very happy belated New Year. It will certainly be a most eventful year with the US Presidential election beginning with the primaries and caucuses in various States leading to the election itself in early November. President Bush signed the Aquaculture Bill to develop the offshore sector in the first decade of this Century and President Obama followed this through. It will be interesting to see what the next President of the United States will make of the US industry and whether it will attract more investment for expansion. The US is still a net importer of seafood products and this position must be addressed in the future. In the UK we may get a referendum for our EU membership, what will be the significance for trade and export of fish including Scottish salmon and shellfish if we decided to leave I wonder? Also what would be our relationship with the commission or involvement on European grants and other scientific matters following the referendum? It will be a most complex situation and yet Norway seems to do quite well financially in terms of EU scientific consortium associations and is also a participant in food safety issues, animal feed legislation and aquaculture policy as it affects us all. With respect to research, I participated in the BBSRC/ NERC UK Research Council meeting held in London on December 8th last year. There were some brief introductions
of the new joint aquaculture research initiative with many UK Universities being represented. Many provided a series of ‘Flash’ presentations of their current research as well as their interests or aspirations for future work. It was interesting to see so many potential researchers who have never been involved in the subject before seeking to find new associations. The ‘pot’ of money on offer is actually relatively small and it’s a typical British solution to be ‘seen’ to do the right thing and try to make us British scientists happy with some incentives from the government even in these times of austerity. Those with ‘omics’ in their bids were typically in abundance and the ‘gut micro-biome’ had a field day with many institutions vying to take this area into new dimensions and make aquaculture that much more ‘sustainable’ with their gut instinct for so many feed additives of probiotic potential. Well we will see how this modest funding stretched over 5 years will make a difference when so much ground work and fundamental research needs to be undertaken in many other important areas of fish nutrition (e.g. bioenergetics, amino acid and trace element revision of requirements etc.) and feed technology especially in the macro-feed ingredient domain and more effective formulations. The stringent officialdom from the UK legislator authorities covering fish research (even benign nutritional trials, on the whim of your local inspector) if undertaken in British universities present their own additional restrictions and challenges compared to previous times when pragmatic and informed common sense was the order of the day. That combined with most universities in the UK lacking ‘state of the art’ fish holding facilities designed for realistic aquaculture scenarios does not auger well for the future for us in the UK to compete with the rest of Europe and beyond. Indeed, as a professor with over 30 years’ experience I am most disappointed in the UK Higher Education platform when it comes to aquaculture research overall and its perception of this very important industry within the agribusiness sector and lack of foresight. My work is now more directed overseas these days and of course it is in SE Asia where most of this industry is growing anyway and where the research is so badly needed. In this current issue we have again some exciting features and articles to launch the New Year. Including an update of the global catfish conference, and an article by Cesar Marcial Escobedo Bonilla on shrimp pathogens and their control. We feature the latest cooling and drying technologies from Buhler and use of feed barges by AKVA as essential mechanisms within the industry. On the feed commodity area we include a timely report on cottonseed protein as an alternative feed ingredient with its benefits. Our guest interview is with Dr Mian Riaz. Additionally there are major events for 2016 such as this month’s World Aquaculture Society conference in Las Vegas, Victam Asia and Taiwan seafood events. We are also delighted to have Dr Alexandros Samartzis join the team as a regular columnist in the magazine - see his fist piece on page 7 of this edition. This is a good start to a busy year, so enjoy the current issue and please maintain your invaluable contributions. Professor Simon Davies
Meet the team at up-coming international events
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