Foreword
In 2018, EUMOFA released a groundbreaking “Blue bioeconomy: situation report and perspectives” report that provided a comprehensive overview of the blue bioeconomy sector in the European Union. By definition, “blue bioeconomy” incorporates any economic activity associated with the use of renewable aquatic biological resources to make products. Examples of these wide-ranging products include novel foods and food additives, animal feeds, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, materials (e.g. clothes and construction materials) and energy. Businesses that grow the raw materials for these products, or that extract, refine, process and transform the biological compounds, as well as those developing the required technologies and equipment all participate in the blue bioeconomy.
The report was meant to be a one-of-kind publication for EUMOFA, which traditionally deals with typical aquaculture and fisheries, where the fish or shellfish are caught or produced for human consumption. Of course, these typical entities are still blue bioeconomy, but “traditional” ones, whereas the report focused on cutting-edge applications of aquatic biomass.
EUMOFA’s foray into new territory was quite well received by the sector, when the report was presented at the kick-off event of the Blue Bioeconomy Forum in December 2018. In the wake of this success, it was decided to make the Blue Bioeconomy Report a regular publication, to be released every other year.
Building on the findings of the first report, EUMOFA hosted a stakeholder workshop that took place at the European Maritime Day in Lisbon in May 2019. An open consultation ensued, with the aim of letting stakeholders have their say on what topics the next edition, this one, would have to cover. Three topics unequivocally emerged as the most requested:
- Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA)
- Innovative uses for fish rest raw material (RRM)
- Cell-plant technology and cellular mariculture
Thus, this edition of the Blue Bioeconomy Report is structured in three sections: the first overviews the past, present and future of IMTA, the second is a case study on the use of fish rest raw materials in Demark, and the third reports on the emerging technology of cellular mariculture.
Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture
IMTA can be defined as the practice which combines, in the appropriate proportions, the cultivation of fed aquaculture species (e.g. finfish, shrimp) with organic extractive aquaculture species (e.g. shellfish, herbivorous fish) and inorganic extractive aquaculture species (e.g. seaweed) to create balanced systems for environmental sustainability (biomitigation), economic stability (product diversification and risk reduction) and social acceptability (better management practices). Its basic mission goals call for: i) environmental remediation of wastes from finfish farming, and ii) prospects of additional income from the added biomass of the other components.
IMTA has progressed from the land-based co-culture of fish and rice, shown in clay models of rice fields and aquatic life dating back 2 000 years to the late Han period, to holistic aquaculture introduced in the 1970s, to the concepts of today. References to the use of different trophic levels in aquaculture or polyculture for remediation of nutrient overloads or additional productivity date from the early1970s, and IMTA was in essence a reality in Sanggou Bay and elsewhere in China in the 1980s. The actual phrase “integrated multi-trophic aquaculture” was introduced in 2004 by Thierry Chopin and Shawn Robinson, Canadian IMTA champions.
The report takes a good look at the state of play of IMTA in the EU and worldwide, with an analysis of its potential and of its challenges. IMTA has obtained encouraging but not commercial-scale results in most of its work to date, and has shown promising environmental and economic benefits. But difficulties remain in encouraging established mainstream producers, such as salmon farms and off-shore wind farms, to integrate the types of IMTA offered. Thus, it would seem that a new direction needs to be taken – away from the classic model of finfish cage at top, bivalve lines or cages round-about or below, and seaweed on the sea bottom. The evidence for this model is excellent in research scale and in silico modelling but dubious or at least inconsistent and not robust enough in real life for industry to invest and undertake the additional operational complexities that would be needed.
Moving forward in Europe, the European Parliament report of 2018 has proven to be a key starting point for policy changes and actions that can aid aquaculture innovations, including IMTA. It specifically calls for pilot projects on IMTA, agreeing with the Food from the Oceans scientific report that the only way to obtain significantly more food and biomass from the ocean in a short period of time is to harvest organisms at the bottom of the food chain, such as macroalgae and bivalve molluscs. Even though the conditions are not yet fully in place in Europe for the wide-scale adoption of IMTA, commercial and consumer interests are both growing in light of an economic and environment case for adoption of IMTA, as well as clear policy drivers for its future development.
Case study: fish rest raw materials in Denmark
The case study on the use of fish rest raw materials in Demark follows a recommendation from the Roadmap for the blue bioeconomy published in December 2019, which called for options to “increase the valorisation of rest raw material from fisheries and other aquatic biomass”. Rest raw material (RRM), a literal translation of the Norwegian term “restråstoff”, comprises all the potentially useful material that is removed in order to prepare biomass for food use. Traditional processing of finfish, such as Atlantic cod, produces only the fillets for human consumption. In the past, everything else (the RRM) was either used for animal feed or simply wasted. Increasingly, efforts are being made to utilise RRM, extracting as much value as possible by processing it for human consumption.
Denmark is a big seafood nation in the EU in terms of fishery, aquaculture, fish meal/oil production, and trade. Based on the methodology for this report, the total available volume of RRM in Denmark in 2019 was between 530 000 and 540 000 tonnes. This included between 167 000 and 175 000 tonnes of RRM from the food and aquaculture for human consumption supply chain, and the 8 500 tonnes of RRM Danish fishers assumedly discarded at sea – discards that had potential for entering the economy if brought ashore. Plus, aquaculture production provided almost 18 000 tonnes of by-products (fish manure and self-dead fish) which were utilised in the Danish biogas plants, and Denmark had a net import of 345 000 tonnes of other marine by-products.
The case study found that RRM is mainly used for fishmeal and fish oil, animal feed, biogas and indirect human consumption, the latter use achieving the highest prices when utilised for food additives or supplements, such as the oil in Omega-3 capsules.
Cellular mariculture and cell-based seafood
The emerging technology of cellular mariculture, defined as the production of marine products from cell cultures rather than from whole plants or animals, is attracting growing interest due to its potential to address public health, environmental and animal welfare challenges. For seafood from fish cell and tissue-cultures, it represents an emerging approach to address similar challenges with industrial aquaculture and marine capture systems.
Plant cell culture systems represent a potential renewable source of valuable compounds, flavours, fragrances, and colorants which cannot be produced by microbial cells or chemical synthesis. The principal advantage of this technology is that it may provide a continuous, reliable source of plant pharmaceuticals and could be used for the large-scale culture of plant cells from which these metabolites can be extracted.
Cell-based seafood, in contrast with animal-based seafood, can combine developments in biomedical engineering and modern aquaculture techniques. Biomedical engineering developments, such as the closed system bioreactor production of animal cells, create a basis for the large-scale production of marine animal cells. Aquaculture techniques such as genetic modification and closed system aquaculture have achieved significant gains in production that can pave the way for innovations in cell-based seafood production.
The EUMOFA team acknowledges with grateful thanks the input, feedback and expertise provided by the wide range of representatives from the bioeconomy sector who kindly cooperated in the compilation of this study. A special mention goes to Meredith Lloyd-Evans, who authored the first section of the report, and to Pierre and Nicolas Erwes, who authored the third section.