Fish R&D in East Asia has put much of its past effort into promoting standards to meet ‘Western’ import health and quality regulations. Peter O’Neill finds signs of a significant value shift upwards on the lucrative bio and innovation fronts.
Government and businesses in the less wealthy countries of East Asia have been preoccupied over the last 15 years in maximising revenue from the export of wild and farmed product. This has meant focusing on HACCP and various veterinary, cold chain and packaging requirements.
One clear result has been the vast expansion of modern processing units. Marine, river and land fishing operations have also been the focus of more ‘extension’ training and socio-economic development to bring the poorer fish-handling communities into partnership.
However, a quick diversion from tiger shrimp into other sectors of certain Tiger economies shows how the fishing industry has lagged well behind on science for value-added products. The Tigers leapt from a low base straight into the electronic and telecoms era, ahead, for example, of Germany with its giant, old ‘legacy’ telephone network. South Korea now has the most wired population on the planet. China’s global production of electronics is obvious.
South Korea has blazed a global trail in the fast, quality production of human vaccines. India and China are also developing similar strategies on the bio and pharmaceutical fronts, tapping into a large pool of graduates as well as low-cost, educated staff for routine laboratory work.
Catch up
This review is a snapshot of research activities in the region with some detail from a few countries. An overview of the leaders on the bio-front on high-value extracts and, on the other hand, who are still focusing largely on fish health, hygiene for export and increased stock breeding, can be seen at the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center Council website (www.seafdec.org ).
Its partner body, the World Aquaculture Society has been working with a regional team to develop advanced research amongst members of its Asian Pacific Chapter run by Roy Palmer of Australia.
The core change has been in the last five to 10 years. The academic sector in most of these countries has now established new fisheries institutions and research centres or added a modern bio-industrial element to existing ones.
They are beginning to refocus their sights on several targets. These include additives for the food and neutraceutical industries at home and abroad, tapping into a vast market for own-build, low-cost, high quality equipment such as fish finders or ‘tropicalised’ cage equipment for inshore and offshore and inland.
This region is a world leader in aquaculture production volume and so it has the potential to lead in research.
A third line of development is the ability, which only a few have at the moment, to offer foreign companies research services at the high bio level on extracts for human use, as well as fish pathology, therapeutic products, breeding services and feed research.
The aid dilemma
If one looks at countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia, they are among a number of recipients of development aid for their fisheries’ sectors which has included not only cash for projects but a degree of technology transfer.
While Western aid bodies such as Norway’s Norad and Denmark’s Danida have a remit to offer independent collaboration, they also reflect the needs of their home industries through provision of consultants. So the focus has often been help with certification of products for export, as well as local production safety issues or perhaps breeding stock of species which might later be exported back to Europe.
The Western fishery technology industries, from cages to pin-boning machines, also hope to find new markets and sales, even if aid is usually no longer tied to buying such equipment; and there may be joint ventures for manufacture.
But dependence on such collaboration can be both good and bad for the recipient country. It can slow down domestic, own-manufacture of equipment and own-research on advanced fish products and intellectual property (IP) advances.
The dilemma for local research centres is when to break loose from this comfortable cage. South Korea and Taiwan are doing it on the bio research front, while mainland China is moving on the equipment front and doing interesting work on breeding for marine and farmed restocking in its massively expanding offshore cage sector.
Caging the typhoon
China has been slashing back its wild fleet, in tandem with South Korea, Japan and Vietnam. That means finding new jobs for hundreds of thousands of fishermen.
As a world leader in farmed fish, the obvious route for new revenue is for China is to maximise the farmed sector, and research on seafood derivatives. Landside is not easy because of property costs, inshore has a variety of limitations, but offshore is wide open.
The model until recently has been acres of inshore bamboo cages at risk from typhoons or large outdoor, concrete-walled, shoreline breeding reservoirs which WF has seen around the coast of Shandong province on the tempestuous Bohai Sea.
They have been key, for example, in breeding and growth research by the government’s Fishery Research Institute in Yantai City, on one of the most valuable seafood products by weight – sea slugs. But offshore cages, not concrete, are the future.
Another partner with Yantai, the Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, around the coast at Qingdao, reports on the importance of offshore cage development. According to institute researchers Jiaxin Chen, Hao Xu, Zhixin Chen, and YuTang Wang, China started artisanal-built cage farming in 1970s.
Then the big push for large modern systems started only in 2000,with government assistance for testing and deployment of what were all foreign designs. Operations had to cope with the vagaries of the violent typhoon season, high sea currents and adaptability for feeding and harvesting. (Taking the scheduled overnight ferry across the sea of Bohai between Yantai and Dalian is only recommended for stomachs of steel.)
The foreign designs have included Japan’s metal frame gravity cage and floating rope cages (the latter also used in Taiwan). The floating rope structure has worked well for inshore breeding. From 2002, the submersible Ocean Spar ‘sea station’ from the US, proved excellent for the difficult conditions over a three-year trial, but the researchers say “the crucial shortcoming” of the dish-formed cage was difficulties in harvesting the fish. Chinese engineers went to work and a different dish-formed design solved the problem and made it popular.
But the real innovation has been a home-designed and built submersible, and it comes with full IP rights, highlighting the shift to, and importance of IP as part of the growing awareness of the potential for international sales of the cages and, the higher value fish farmed in them.
The researchers say the Chinese cage, developed at the Shanghai-based Fishery Machinery and Instrument Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences (FMIRI), is specially designed for flatfish farming such as flounder, sole, turbot and halibut.
Chinese cages cost up to 60% less than imported ones, and offshore operation avoids the costly pumping of seawater into indoor cement and fibreglass tanks for shore-side farming. The FMIRI cage has several layers for different species and can be easily raised for maintenance and harvesting.
Research by the Yantai Institute, based in the provincial HQ in the Shandong Ocean Science and Technology building, showed that 50-100g fingerlings at 20 per sq metre reached 800g to 1kg in six to eight months. The cage ably handled five-metre waves, 100km winds and one metre per second currents.
With no room left inshore, various coastal provinces plan to put in at least 15,000 offshore cage operations during 2010 alone. There are an estimated 1 million-plus traditional, fisherman-built bamboo cages inshore.
Higher expertise
A glance at the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences shows the level of expertise around the country. There are nine fisheries research institutes and four fisheries stations with plenty of doctorates among the hundreds of staff.
Research on breeding and farming sturgeon has been a success story along with a vaccine breakthrough against viral haemorrhagic disease in freshwater grass carp (ctenopharyngodon idellus).
They have also been getting into fish finding equipment as well as building China’s first gear-rotating, impeller oxygen-increasing machine for aquaculture ponds.
But as Professor Zhou Deqing, Quality Director of the China National Fisheries Products Quality Supervision and Testing Centre in Qingdao told WF, the processing side of the industry is having a tough time. It needs to raise its game into higher value products across the board.
Those who have visited national seafood fairs at Qingdao or Dalian, and seen the scale of the industry, may be surprised at Deqing’s figures.
He said the industry is over-concentrated on the export market and has low domestic sales development. As the global credit crunch struck, only about 180 fishery product exporting companies (out of more than 600) in Shandong province made a profit in 2008,while 370 broke even and 50 companies ceased production.
Plants handling eel, shrimp and tilapia were running at less than 50% of capacity in Guandong Province in the first two months of 2009. He said the way forward has to be optimisation of products at every level.
The signs are there. Yantai Institute has developed tests for determining traces of diethylstilbestrol in aquatic products by high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence. Diethylstilbestrol was developed as a synthetic oestrogen for growth applications and later banned in humans because of side-effects on women, and animals in the EU, but has sometimes been found in aquaculture operations.
The message is the same in Vietnam, which is much less advanced on the higher research and application front. While Vietnam has gone from almost zero to more than $4 billion (€3.2 billion) in seafood exports there are concerns.
Delegates at this April’s Vietnam Seafood Festival in Can Tho city on the Mekong, were warned by officials and politicians that there was no room for complacency and were reported as saying there “remain many weaknesses” with “…offshore fishing technology and facilities remain[ing] modest and obsolete and the application of biotechnologies in aquaculture does not meet expectations”.
One reason given for the problems was poor coordination between scientists, managers, businesses and fisheries breeders and this was holding up the sector’s development.
Turning trash to cash
Looking to the future, South Korea’s Professor Se-Kwon Kim, director of the Marine Bioprocess Centre at Pukyong National University, believes that for too long developing and other countries having been throwing away fish and waste as trash when in fact it should be given to so-called “micronauts” to turn into cash.
These scientists venture deep into the microscopic world of animal building blocks to examine the impact they have on species of all kinds.
Kim told WF that his present programme is focused on “bioactive marine derived compounds such as phlorotannins, bioactive peptides, chitooligosaccharides etc and their beneficial health impact on biological activities.”
However, the potential, importance and market for their use is clear when looking at the possible applications: diabetes control, asthma management, preventing bacterial and fungal growth in food; beating back food-borne bugs, such as staphylococcus aureus, which have become resistant to penicillin, early diagnosis of joint disease, therapy for breast and stomach cancer cells, anti-inflammatories and more.
Kim said many young graduates are choosing careers in this field. While major Korean conglomerates are beating a path to the doors of institutes such as his in pursuit of the billion-dollar potential of these products, either as ‘neutraceuticals’ for the food, health and beauty sectors or for direct applications in medicines.
The government has been putting its money where its mouth is and has increased research funds for seafood processing and marine biotechnology, he added.
In the last five years, traditional fishery research institutes in Korea have all boosted their advanced research capacities to profit from this sector. Kim said there now 13 universities conducting research on marine resources, which – due to Korea’s reputation for high quality – are attracting a lot of foreign students.
But how much real cash is there for trash? Neuropeptides play an important role in the brain and may impact on anti-Alzheimer drugs – that treatment market alone is estimated to be worth more than $5 billion (€4 billion) per annum. The global neutraceutical market is estimated at around $200 billion (€160.8 million).
