Seafood is what your eating actually what you think it is?

[Bud Man]

What Are You Eating?

An unknown percentage of the fish we eat isn't what's it's purported to be – the Food and Agriculture Organisation explores how forensic techniques could help address the problem.

The first victim was a Caucasian male in his late 30s. He popped down to the pub for lunch and ordered fish and chips. As he enjoyed his meal alongside a pint, he thought to himself that he'd never tasted haddock so fresh. But he was wrong. What he was eating wasn't haddock at all.

The second victim was a young Japanese woman in her early twenties. On a business trip to the US, she ordered tuna sashimi for lunch. It seemed fishy to her—and she was dead right.

The third was a South African fisherman we'll call "Nate." He never ate a thing, but as he plied the waters of the new fishery he'd recently started working, elsewhere poachers harvested protected spiny lobster and exported them with false documents—further damaging recovering fishing grounds Nate hoped to one day fish again.

In each of these three hypothetical cases the culprit was mistaken or misrepresented identity—of seafood.

"Identifying unprocessed fish is usually fairly easy," says Michele Kuruc of FAO's Fisheries and Aquaculture Department. "But today seafood is transported far abroad, to places where it may not be well known. Plus, as the industry has globalised, it is common that fish products are processed on floating factories before they come to shore. What inspectors see often doesn't look much like a fish in the wild."

In some instances, accurately identifying fish may be beyond the abilities of inspectors. Innocent clerical errors can end up turning one type of fish into another.

Or unscrupulous fishers and traders game the system to avoid restrictions or taxes.

According to Ms Kuruc, those involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing use many methods to conceal their illegal activities and get their ill-gotten goods to market. "Fraudulent product substitution and use of false labels and documentation are frequently employed to transport and market products illicitly," she says.

The result? An unknown percentage of seafood on the shelves simply isn't what's it's purported to be.

This is a problem. Today's more conscious consumers are aware of the multiple health benefits of eating seafood—but are also keen to be sure they're eating fish that has been caught or farmed responsibly and is safe to eat.

And there's much more at stake.

In recent years a number of major food retailers have committed to stocking only seafood certified as sustainable. As of January 1, 2010, the world's biggest seafood market, the European Union, has put in place regulations aimed at blocking imports of fish not harvested legally.

With 110 million tonnes of seafood consumed globally per year, international trade in fish is valued at a record high of $86 billion annually and is a major source of employment and government revenue for developing countries, where many of the fishing grounds that feed the first world are found.

Additionally, concerns about the wellbeing of many fish stocks necessitates diligent oversight of what fish are being taken and where.

Forensic technologies based on genetics and chemistry are already being used by some countries to monitor and control trade in produce, animals and timber. So FAO recently convened a workshop of experts, inspectors, law enforcement officials, scientists and academics to discuss how they might be more widely deployed in fisheries enforcement.

"We're interested in promoting wider use of available forensic techniques, in particular by developing countries, Ms Kuruc says."Some countries have successfully used various forensic methods in investigations and court cases, but many fisheries monitoring, control and surveillance personnel still remain unaware of their existence."

DNA analysis can reveal the species of a suspect white fillet. Chemical tests on fish earbones reveal absorbed nutrients and pinpoint the region where they were caught.

"We need to push the envelope, because we can be sure that those involved in IUU fishing are doing so," Ms Kuruc added. "One workshop participant related how a group convicted of illegally trading abalone confessed that they learned techniques for destroying evidence by watching CSI: Miami."

In addition to surveying the state of the art and brainstorming how forensics might be used in fisheries and identifying needs—especially for capacity building in developing countries—the meeting also looked at best practices in handling evidence, how inspectors should be trained, and identifying laboratories capable of handling testing. (In many cases, labs in developing countries currently testing for food quality could be upgraded to conduct forensic work.)

The group also agreed to operate as an ad hoc FAO reference network that can be tapped by authorities around the world for guidance and advice.

"Fish can be properly identified if samples are handled properly, get to the right labs, and checked using forensic techniques," said Ms Kuruc. "So the idea is to help countries that don't have such facilities and know how can access so them so they can identify and prosecute cases of malfeasance."


source
http://www.thefishsite.com

[Roddy Hays]

That's an interesting site, BugMan. Did you read this thought-provoking article ?

http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/...shing-industry

[SportFishStaff]

That's an interesting site, BugMan. Did you read this thought-provoking article ?

http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/...shing-industry

Roddy,

Very good read about Bio Diesel,

My brother worked for 20 years at a major player in the diesel boat engines and heavy equipment manufacturers, before being laid off due to the economy.

He told me that just by using bio diesel in our over the road tractor trailers and heavy equipment alone we could all but eliminate our dependency on foreign oil.
The reason why we are not going to see that is currently if you buy a brand new piece of equipment from his former company and run bio diesel in it it voids the warranty.
So what company in their right mind would spend millions on new equipment to have no warranty on them.

So until Mobil, Exxon,Shell, and such have the bio diesel market wrapped up. I doubt you will see a complete acceptance for bio diesel, I think it will come but only when big oil says so.

If you research who is on the cutting edge of the algae to bio fuel research you will probably find Big Oil involved some how.

Thanks Tim

[SportFishStaff]

Well that wasn't hard to find should have looked before I added my last post.



Big oil eyes algae to solve biofuel problems [fr] [de]
Published: 29 July 2009


Oil giants such as Shell and ExxonMobil are pouring millions of research funding into algae in the hope that the technology can solve environmental problems associated with intensive crop cultivation for biofuels. Raffaello Garofalo, executive director of the European Algae Biomass Association (EABA), outlines the potential and challenges of algae in an interview with EurActiv.
More on this topic
LinksDossier:Algae: The ultimate biofuel?
Interview:EABA: Promises and challenges of algae biofuels

With ethanol and biodiesel coming under fire for driving up food prices and putting biodiversity at risk, the EU has committed to 'second-generation' biofuels as a cleaner alternative.

Second-generation biofuels are made from ligno-cellulosic biomass - the 'woody' part of plants - which does not compete with food production. Sources include residues from crop and forest harvest such as leaves, tree bark, straw or wood chippings, as well as the non-edible portions of corn or cane.

But there is still a fundamental problem with woody biomass: it often competes with scarce agricultural land and can raise the prices of raw materials like wood.

"One of the current limitations of biofuels is that they need to be produced using land," says Raffaello Garofalo, executive director at the European Algae Biomass Association (EABA). "And this applies to present versions but also to biomass-to-liquids for instance, which are second-generation. Because you still need to have a forest, you still need to harvest biomass somewhere on land."

With algae, however, this problem is virtually solved. "Unlike an agricultural crop, algae does not need at all productive land or good land that is normally used for food," Garofalo says.

Algae grows best in seawater, which comes in virtually unlimited supply, the Italian points out. And the micro-organism seems to be particularly fond of polluted seawater, which helps it grow at exponential rates.

"In all polluted sea places, there is a phenomenon which happens naturally called eutrophication, which means there is an over-growth of algae," says Garofalo. "Precisely because pollution brings excess nutrients to the algae and therefore they grow exponentially."

The idea, he says, is to feed the polluted water to the algae via transparent plastic tubes, using what industry specialists call a bio-reactor. The algae absorb the pollution as a nutrient, and the water can then be returned back to the ocean cleaner than it was when it entered, he explains. In the meantime, the algae grow into biomass, which can be used for biofuels.

"So the immediate impact on the environment is that the water is cleaned up," Garofalo says.

Growing algae can be done in open ponds but the process can be reproduced anywhere on land - including unproductive land such as desert areas - using a bio-reactor.

Big oil investing in research

The technology, which is still at an early stage of development, has attracted the attention of several major oil companies.

US oil major ExxonMobil recently launched a $600 million research programme in cooperation with Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) to develop, test and produce biofuels from photosynthetic algae. "While significant work and years of research and development still must be completed, if successful, algae-based fuels could help meet the world's growing demand for transportation fuel while reducing greenhouse gas emissions," said Michael Dolan, senior vice-president of ExxonMobil.

Shell launched its own research project in December 2007 to study the commercial viability of selected algae strains at a Hawaii-based facility. "Algae have great potential as a sustainable feedstock for producing diesel-type fuels with a very small CO2 footprint," said Graeme Sweeney, Shell's executive vice-president for future fuels and CO2. "This demonstration will be an important test of the technology and, critically, of commercial viability."

Cost the main challenge

However, a number of challenges remain before algae can be used for mainstream commercial applications, with uncertainties about cost the greatest obstacle to date.
"For most algae applications we are still in fundamental research," says Garofalo. "There is still research in order to identify the algae kinds or families which are most appropriate in order to produce biofuels. There is still research on what are the best bio-reactor shape or plastic is best to do this."

Also, it is still an open question whether it is better to grow algae in bio-reactors or in open ponds.

Then comes the question of how to harvest the plants. "Because algae are micro-organisms of a size ten times smaller than hair, you cannot harvest them with a net, for example," Garofalo says.

Options for harvesting include centrifugation or chemical flocculation, which pushes all the microalgae together, but here too, there are high costs associated with such processes.

Capturing carbon dioxide emissions

Microalgae have also been proven to grow more quickly when fed with carbon dioxide. If algae plants are fitted next to factories or power stations, this could even present prospects for reducing emissions from industry.

"You could for example put algae next to a cement plant or a thermo-electric plant and you inject the carbon coming out of the plant into the bio-reactor," Garofalo explains. "This means that the CO2, instead of coming out of the chimney, goes into the bio-reactor to produce algae, which is burnt a second time as a fuel and only then goes into the atmosphere. So the same CO2 can be re-used twice."

In Arizona, GreenFuel, a private company, has developed a large scale algae-to-biofuel plant, which uses CO2 emissions from a nearby power plant, the Arizona Public Service Redhawk power facility. The facility, which opened in 2005, won the 2006 Platts Emissions Energy Project of the Year Award.

Legal and regulatory obstacles

But there are more challenges standing in the way of algae-to-biofuels in Europe. First among those is the lack of a legal framework. "If somebody today was able to make algae biofuels, it would be impossible to market. Because algae biomass is today, legally speaking, an unknown flying object," Garofalo says. "There is no legislation, no definition, no permits, nothing."

The European Algae Biomass Association (EABA) was launched on 5 June partly to address this issue and seek legal clarity under the EU's recently adopted Renewables Directive.

Looking for innovative products beyond biofuels

But the main objective of the association will be to foster dialogue between researchers and industry. "Otherwise, there is a risk of science going in a direction which is completely useless for industry," Garofalo says.

And the key to future commercial profitability, he explains, is to understand that there is more to algae than just biofuel production.

"It will never be economically viable to produce biodiesel or bioethanol from algae biomass if we don't think about the co-products. For instance, when you produce biodiesel, the lipid or the oil part of the algae represents about 25-30% of the product. But what do you do with the remaining 70%? We call it a by-product, but actually it is the same product in terms of weight."

Aside from biofuels and jet fuels, AEBA says other applications include as nutrients, pharmaceuticals, animal feed or bio-based products. In all these sectors, algae and aquatic biomass have outstanding potential to achieve a real revolution towards a fully sustainable economy, the association believes.

However, Garofalo refuses to be drawn into making predictions on when the technology could become commercially viable. "It would not be responsible to give you dates. What we want to avoid is a kind of Internet bubble where people speculate about the quantities and prices of micro-algae in the future."

"There is a lot of investment in research, and this research is driven by the conviction that economies of scale, improvement in yields and output are achievable. It is a matter of time."

"Until research is conclusive, it is impossible to say when things will happen."

[Bud Man]

Roddy, That's another good article. In this day and age you really need to educate yourself on whats going on. Than I try to make the best possible decision.

I really only eat seafood out if its a good sushi restaurant but still, with them you can't be certain where the fish is coming from. Local seafood market I go to is small i know the guys there and they own some of their own boats. Mostly eat what i can catch.

Tim, That's just another way money controls politics and the world.